Chrome 69 makes Flash use annoying

Martin Brinkmann
Aug 24, 2018
Google Chrome
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38

Google Chrome 69, the next Stable version of the popular desktop web browser, will make Flash usage highly annoying for users that require it.

The company revealed that it will change the current permissions system for Flash. Currently, Chrome users can allow a site to run Flash. Doing so enables Flash support for that particular site from that moment on until the permission gets revoked by the user.  When you visit the site again, Flash is enabled on the site so that it can be used without having to give explicit permission again.

Starting with Chrome 69, Chrome does not allow users to set permanent Flash permissions for sites anymore. The effect? Users have to allow Flash on each session. Visit a gaming site regularly that requires Flash? Your favorite online game still requires Flash? Need to allow it for every session you do. Some sites still use Flash for interactive content, upload forms and other site elements, and users who interact with those elements regularly need to allow Flash content to load on every browsing session.

chrome flash allow prompt

Google notes on the Chromium Flash Roadmap site that the rationale behind the decision is to "require affirmative user choice to run Flash Player content without that choice persisting across multiple sessions".

The change will make regular Flash use on sites highly frustrating for users as they have to give permissions over and over again when they visit those sites and need to interact with or load Flash content on them.

Google and other browser makers started to deprecate support for Flash in 2016 and while the process is still ongoing, Flash use on the Internet dropped considerably already. Chrome usage of Flash dropped from 80% in 2014 to less than 8% in 2018.

Mozilla too made Flash usage more restrictive in Firefox, for instance by blocking Flash content over HTTP in Firefox 55.

All modern browsers, e.g. Edge and Chrome, block Flash content by default and require explicit permission by the user to run it. Adobe announced in 2016 that it will retire Flash by 2020.

Google plans to tighten the screws even further in regards to Flash in mid 2019. Flash will be disabled by default in Chrome from mid 2019 onward. Users may enable Flash in the Settings at that point in time but will have to allow Flash content to run per site per session.

Flash support will be removed from Chromium and Chrome in 2020.

Closing Words

Flash is on its way out and all major browsers will stop supporting it by 2020 at the latest. The removal of Flash from browsers means that some content that is still on the Web cannot be loaded anymore. I'm not sure if someone started a preservation project for Flash content, e.g. with the help of virtual environments, to preserve Flash apps and games.

Google's decision to remove the ability to allow Flash for a site permanently will be highly annoying for Chrome users who visit Flash sites regularly. The move may drop Flash usage further in the browser as its use gets even more annoying.

Now You: What is your take on the new requirement in Chrome?

Summary
Chrome 69 makes Flash use annoying
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Chrome 69 makes Flash use annoying
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Google Chrome 69, the next Stable version of the popular desktop web browser, will make Flash usage highly annoying for users that require it. 
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Ghacks Technology News
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Comments

  1. Mike Loux said on February 20, 2019 at 10:03 pm
    Reply

    I absolutely loathe flash, but…our company uses ADP for time reporting, and as a manager who approves time cards and PTO requests…I gotta use it. So having to click to enable Flash every. damn. time. gets really annoying. And Chrome still has the best password management of any of the browsers that I have found, and ADP requires some pretty ridiculous passwords, so using another browser is really not a viable option (although I do have to do that for Oracle, since some of that needs Java, which also won’t load on Chrome). *sigh*.

  2. Anonymous said on December 12, 2018 at 5:28 am
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    Well then I guess I wont be using chrome anymore. To have to enable it per session is highly annoying and a major turn off to me. Bye bye google chrome. Time to write my own browser.

  3. Anonymous said on September 29, 2018 at 7:24 pm
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    Wow, this made me really angry… they disallow me to have a permanent flash player setting on a website i trust, wtf? Really annoying when you play a game regularly.
    It cost me quite some time to figure out, how to have still a permanent setting, so i gladly share it to all those that need it:
    – open ‘chrome://flags/#enable-ephemeral-flash-permission’
    – set ‘Enable Ephemeral Flash Permissions’ to ‘Disabled’
    – now chrome will no longer reset your flash settings whe the session ends

    1. Anonymous said on October 9, 2018 at 2:45 pm
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      Thanks for this!

  4. Kaz Vorpal said on September 28, 2018 at 4:28 am
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    The reason for this idiocy is the corrupt, worthless, parasitic political class of Europe and all their insane laws attempting to censor the Internet, like GDPR.

  5. Bob said on September 22, 2018 at 11:46 pm
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    BTW Android doesn’t seem to have a problem with it.

  6. Bob said on September 22, 2018 at 11:43 pm
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    HIGHLY ANNOYING!!! The two games I use the most, several times a day, both use Flash. Please put it back!

  7. Lish said on September 20, 2018 at 4:22 pm
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    Kronos, one of (if not the) biggest time and attendance systems around, requires Flash if you’re doing anything web based…The company I work for doesn’t have physical clocks and recommends using Chrome because IE and our SSO don’t play well together.

    Factoring in how expensive and time-consuming a Kronos upgrade is, this seems really short sighted and a way to make people who reluctantly switched to Chrome go browser hunting.

  8. Anonymous said on September 19, 2018 at 2:38 pm
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    I absolutely LOATHE all things about Flash and despite the rantings of folks about not trusting Google Chrome (in which case why are you here wasting energy posting, just continue using what you like), I really find this latest change annoying. As I said, I don’t like Flash, but as a sys admin, I still have a few legacy systems that require it for the administrative tool, so it makes using them extremely tedious. I completely support deprecating Flash, I support retiring it, but at least bring back the ability to persist my site permission choice… and really that’s my complaint, the lack of respect for MY CHOICE as a user.

  9. Jamie said on September 14, 2018 at 5:14 pm
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    It does not matter what your opinions are about Flash; my company’s entire internal HR web page, including employee timeclock, is built 100% in Flash. Thanks to this update, no one at my company is able to clock in; the website disables itself the moment it senses Flash is missing, it does not even give the browser the opportunity to “Allow access”. For years now, Chrome was the only way to reliably get the system to work. Now everyone is screwed because we are not upgrading our internal HR system any time soon.

  10. AA said on September 14, 2018 at 5:01 pm
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    There are people who have no choice but to use flash, for them this policy is extremely annoying. The end user cannot choose to use HTML5 if it is not offered by the site they have to access. Penalizing the user is not the way forward. Luckily we all have a choice of browser. So it’s bye bye Chrome.

  11. Chris said on September 12, 2018 at 2:45 am
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    Flash was way ahead of its time. The developer tools – an in particular the Flex framework – were terrific. Too bad that Adobe screwed up on security.
    I abandoned Flash and switched to HTML/Javascript, and even with the latest React/Angular frameworks I feel like going back to stone age tools banging stones together trying to make fire.

  12. Mr G said on September 5, 2018 at 2:01 pm
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    Now if we can only get rid of WordPress! You want to talk about garbage that gets compromised every five minutes. I know because I work for a hosting company and all our servers get compromised almost every week from that junk. LOL on the guy who said Flash getting updated every week. What planet are you living on… certainly not this one. Flash gets updated less regularly.

    1. Anonymous said on December 12, 2018 at 5:34 am
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      THe company I work for hosts over 1000 wordpress sites and we hardly ever get compromised. Not sure why your having such a issue with it..

  13. John Fenderson said on August 27, 2018 at 5:42 pm
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    Once again, I’m glad that I don’t use Chrome.

  14. Hansss said on August 27, 2018 at 11:54 am
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    The only thing I miss is that Flash videos could prefetch a lot better:
    Just run the video, stop it, and wait until enough is loaded. Very good on slow connections.

    In HTML5 it is somehow not possible. Only vor 1 minute of video.

  15. Anonymous said on August 27, 2018 at 9:41 am
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    Google remove flash support completely NOW, don’t wait until 2020.
    You are the leading browser and it’s the only way the remaining lazy organizations and websites to be forced to abandon this security cancer known as flash.

  16. Anonymous said on August 26, 2018 at 7:00 am
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    Chrome is so far more dangerous than Flash.

  17. Anonymous said on August 26, 2018 at 6:54 am
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    Computer builders should make the same for Google Chrome, a big warning like this at every boot: “use Chrome that we have installed for you as extra free software at your own risks and peril”.

  18. Alain said on August 25, 2018 at 4:02 am
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    Flash has always been the biggest stupid sh*t ever happened in computing. Goodbye old crap !

    1. ShintoPlasm said on August 26, 2018 at 4:07 pm
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      And yet some major sites like ITV still use it, which is enormously frustrating.

    2. Thaumiel said on August 25, 2018 at 9:09 pm
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      >Javascript has always been the biggest stupid sh*t ever happened in computing.
      FTFY. But on a serious note, Flash was long expired. And it doesn’t really run properly in browsers since years, so seasoned users won’t find using the adobe player much of an hassle. Except for sites struck in 2005.

  19. nosamu said on August 25, 2018 at 3:37 am
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    Martin, you said: “I’m not sure if someone started a preservation project for Flash content, e.g. with the help of virtual environments, to preserve Flash apps and games.”
    In fact, there is such a project! It’s called BlueMaxima’s Flashpoint, and you can read about the project here: https://blog.usejournal.com/adobe-flashs-gaming-legacy-thousands-upon-thousands-of-titles-and-my-efforts-to-save-it-58c14811558a

  20. Mike W. said on August 24, 2018 at 11:58 pm
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    I haven’t allowed Flash to be used on any of my computers/browsers for a long time now. In fact, the only place I have ever run into Flash content is occasionally doing things for work, but I am using a work computer so I have less concern regarding safety/privacy in that instance. I don’t really have a problem with Google doing this, they (along with every other major browser and even Adobe) have been signaling the end of Flash for a couple of years now. I suspect that the only developers who haven’t switched away from Flash do it out of laziness or a lack of interest/time. While it is unfortunate that there will likely be some worthwhile content lost as a result of this switch, I can’t say I am all that saddened to see that day coming.

  21. stefann said on August 24, 2018 at 8:04 pm
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    I haven’t used Flash since at least a year back. Was tired of updating it every damn week. Even on my XP x64 i use HTML5 instead. With some tweaks to XP and XP x64 it is possible. Some work, but it works great. It is claimed You can use HTML5 even in Windows 2000, but i doubt the browsers that works in that OS really support that though.

  22. Pierre said on August 24, 2018 at 4:31 pm
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    I blocked it in Edge and Chrome and I uninstalled the NPAPI

  23. pHROZEN gHOST said on August 24, 2018 at 2:41 pm
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    IMHO, this is good news.

    Sites which rely on flash should take this as a warning. They should be in the process of converting to better software. Otherwise, they are going to be obsolete in the near future.

  24. WildByDesign said on August 24, 2018 at 2:17 pm
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    FWIW, I typically add the group policy registry settings (per-site) for users who specifically require Flash Player on any given site. This allows Flash to work only on specified sites and works without user interaction.

    Link: https://www.chromium.org/administrators/policy-list-3#PluginsAllowedForUrls

    You can add these registry entries manually and restart the browser. Or you can make use of this flag (chrome://flags/#enable-policy-tool) and set per-user policies here: chrome://policy-tool/

  25. klaas said on August 24, 2018 at 11:59 am
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    This action has nothing to do with Flash being on the way out. It has all to do with, once again, Google treating its customers as children who cannot make an informed decision, even less an informed choice, therefore papa Google needs to do it.

  26. Anonymous said on August 24, 2018 at 10:52 am
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    Refer to the roadmap, it was published last year – https://www.chromium.org/flash-roadmap#TOC-Upcoming-Changes

  27. Yuliya said on August 24, 2018 at 10:29 am
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    I stopped installing Flash on my Windows 7 PC about five years ago I think. Right about in time VK made the transition from Flash to HTML5.
    On a related note, Microsoft in all their wisdon decided it would be a good idea to boundle Flash in Windows 8 and 10. “Smart” move, I wonder what’s going to happen with LTSB and Server 1607. Both have Flash and both are supported until 2026. By their policy they can’t remove it, and by the looks of it they can’t even modify these OSes to fix a bug, let alone adding/removing features.

  28. Jeff said on August 24, 2018 at 10:10 am
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    Well Adobe doesn’t seem interested in supporting Flash in browsers either. They can always ship it as an extension even if it’s not built-in. But they are onboard in everyone’s plan to completely kill Flash even if it kills a lot of old games and animations.

    1. Anonymous said on August 24, 2018 at 6:41 pm
      Reply

      It’s impossible. Even the powerful legacy addon system couldn’t do that, there’s no way Web Extension can. The only thing capable was the NPAPI plugin system but it’s already gone too

  29. TelV said on August 24, 2018 at 10:03 am
    Reply

    In a couple of years time Flash will reach end-of-life anyway according to the Adobe blog: https://theblog.adobe.com/adobe-flash-update/

  30. owl said on August 24, 2018 at 9:49 am
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    I do not use “Google Chrome” because I dislike Google.
    “Flash Player” is the mainstream in Japan.
    Organizations representing countries and regions such as governments, local government agencies, and the Japan Broadcasting Corporation are sticking to Flash Player, and there are forcing Flash to service users.
    Because Google Chrome has a high market share (Perhaps more than 50%, then IE, Edge) in Japan, it will finally begin to break away from Flash due to use of force.
    Since the vulnerability of Flash is serious, It is a very pleasing decision as a measure against CyberSecurity.

  31. Bean said on August 24, 2018 at 8:37 am
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    I’ll be honest… I don’t trust Flash anymore, I don’t think it’s good technology, and it’s just obsolete now. I’m really not bothered or upset by this in any way.

    Sure there may be a few old nostalgic flash games I liked, but they are not enough to keep me installing this insecure piece of trash (Adobe Flash) to my system in the first place.

    1. Croatoan said on August 24, 2018 at 10:39 pm
      Reply

      If you like the game you can download the game in VM and use SWF Loader to play the game.

  32. seeprime said on August 24, 2018 at 7:58 am
    Reply

    Since Flash use has been restricted on Chrome and Firefox our customers bring their infected PC’s in less frequently. Service now is mostly due to failing hardware. Elimination of Flash is a good thing for our customers, many of which are long retired and on fixed incomes.

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