Google Chrome 55 Fixes Flaws, Blocks Flash

The long, slow march of Adobe's Flash technology off the web has reached another milestone with the debut of Google's Chrome 55 web browser.

Over the last few years, Google has been slowly enacting elements of its plans to deprecate support for Flash in Chrome, in favor of HTML5 based media. In Chrome 42, which debuted in April 2015, Google made Flash content 'click-to-play,' requiring users to click a button before a flash file activates and disabling auto-play of flash content.

Now with Chrome 55, Google is making HTML5 the default for dynamic comment, instead of Flash. There is a major caveat though: not all sites have media available as HTML5 at this point. As such, Chrome 55 still supports flash and users can run it on some sites that provide flash, rather than HTML5, media content. Google Chrome users can configure which sites they want to allow Flash to run on with a new exceptions list in Chrome 55.