While Flash might have been an instrumental tool in web development back in the day, these days the feature seems to provide a fair amount of security headaches for web developers. In fact last year, Google announced that they would begin to pause Flash files that they deem not important. The idea is that it will help improve the experience for users.Turns out Google isn’t alone because Microsoft has recently announced a similar move themselves and that come this summer, they will automatically pause Flash content for its Edge browser that they deem not important as well. Once again they attribute this decision to helping improve performance when browsing websites.
According to Microsoft, “Peripheral content like animations or advertisements built with Flash will be displayed in a paused state unless the user explicitly clicks to play that content. This significantly reduces power consumption and improves performance while preserving the full fidelity of the page. Flash content that is central to the page, like video and games, will not be paused.”
We wouldn’t be surprised if one day support for Flash would stop entirely Just last year, Mozilla temporarily blocked Flash in its Firefox browser due to security concerns. Websites like Twitch also decided to do away with the use of Flash and switched to HTML5 for its videos as well.
Filed in . Read more about Adobe, Edge, Flash, Microsoft and Security.