Google updates Chrome Flash plugin for security, stability Just when you thought Adobe Flash was close to dying out on the web, none other than Google has stepped in to give the much-maligned rich media plugin a new coat of polish. The latest stable version of the online ad-slinger's Chrome browser for Windows includes a redesigned version of the Flash plugin that Google reps say will …
When I'm using my computer and suddenly uninvited sound flares up and it's flash that allowed it to happen, that's when I decided enough was enough.
I decided to install a flash blocking extension for the crash-fantastic plugin. I'm not going to tolerate websites farting audio into my personal space without me clicking on them.
The best / worst I heard was a friend whose computer suddenly started to make porn noises in the other room, because he'd left something open and it spontaneously re-ran itself after being quiet for hours.
Having to click once on a flash area to activate it is slightly inconvenient sometimes, but I'm just happier now most flash is gone.
The fact that a flash stability update makes news says a lot.
yeah, cause of course you couldn't possibly fire off sounds automatically in a webpage via HTML5 audio... oh no, wait - you can!*
And - you've no way of blocking it!
People can design absolute crap using any technology. At least Flash content is easy to block and small to download. Just you wait until everyone starts doing ad banners with whacking great PNGs in HTML5!
*except in Safari where such hideousness is blocked by the browser
Saying that 99.9% of users "fired up Flash" is disingenuous. What it means is that 99.9% of users did one of two things:
1. Went to a site that uses Flash as the default, and falls-back to something else (e.g. HTML 5 video) if it's not there. It would not surprise me if YouTube (for example) did that.
2. Visited a site that had ads on it. Again, these sites will try to push Flash ads on you if they can, because they can get more useful info out of a Flash ad, as well as showing you an annoying moving ad and possibly sound or even one of those horrible expanding ads.
How many of those users would have not even noticed that Flash was not there, if they had not had the Flash plugin installed?
Yep, YouTube does use Flash as the default video format.
Why? Because Flash - for all its faults - is still much, much better at handling video than the various browsers' HTML5 implementations.
http://transitioning.to/2012/01/the-world-of-pain-that-is-html5-video/
Dear Neil,
I'm sorry but you'll have to rewrite your article replacing the now illegal trademark term "Metro" with the term "Windows 8". Did you not receive the memo? Rest assured it will read much better after you've done that; Redmond marketing has assured the board that this will remove any potential confusion in future public correspondence.
As a side note, also please be advised that for the moment it's ok to refer to Redmond as Redmond but that might change soon because we're in legal discussions about a possible infringement here with a small biscuit manufacturer in Sheffield, old England.
Yours sincerely,
Steve Balmer
I love Flashblock, I love seeing little grey boxes where the annoying adverts would have been. Can easily add iPlayer / Sky player to a whitelist. I noticed the upgrade when full screen video kept moving to the main monitor. For years I've had a hack which allows flash video to stay full screen on one of the secondary monitors while I work on the others.
Currently disabled the latest version under 'plugins' until this monitor issue can be hacked again.
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