Making good on its promise from earlier this year, Google will start blocking Flash content in its Chrome browser and switch to HTML5 by default. At first, the changes will only affect a small percentage of users and websites before gradually being rolled out to include all users and websites. Those affected by the change will no longer be able to see Flash content unless they choose to enable it manually for a specific website. Google has also stopped accepting Flash-based advertising across its ad networks and will stop displaying them entirely starting in January.
These days, Flash is widely regarded as a performance-hampering safety hazard and more and more companies are turning their back on what was once the industry standard for animated content. Slowly but surely, Flash’s footprint across the web is vanishing: In October 2016, just 10 percent of websites in the Alexa Top 10,000 used Flash, down from almost 50 percent five years ago.
This chart shows the percentage of websites using Flash.