GOOGLE HAS DELIVERED what could be the killer blow for the much maligned Adobe Flash runtime that has been the cause of so many insecurities it probably qualifies for a course of CBT and some Prozac.
The company has announced that from 1 September it will turn Flash adverts into static images to protect against potential malicious code injections.
The move, first announced in June, has been trialled in the Beta Channel, and is rolling out to stable browser users from Tuesday.
Most of the web realises that HTML5 is the future, despite what Microsoft will tell you about Silverlight, a platform also not supported by Google, and calls have been mounting to kill off Flash once and for all.
As well as the security aspect, Flash slows down web rendering to an extent unacceptable to modern users. And it kills your battery as a result. And it's just awful. And did we mention the hacking?
Adobe has been on an active campaign to move people onto new alternatives like Adobe Air, but the simplicity and compatibility of HTML5 have made it a losing battle.
It will come as a nasty shock to advertisers, the vast majority of which are still using Flash.
The option to kill Flash has always been there. Fiddle about under the bonnet of your browser and it has always been possible to deactivate it. But with Chrome and Chromium derivatives now taking up a large chunk of market share, this could be a huge sea change not just for the browser, but for internet advertising as a whole.
Mobile phones have been Flash free for a long time, and it doesn't seem to have done them any harm. Chrome for Android hasn't used Flash for several years, and in doing so has accelerated the decline of this relic of a bygone era.
Flash won't completely die for a while. There are still proprietary systems relying on it. But this one could be the stake in the heart we've been waiting for to make the internet just that little bit less of a crapshoot. But only a little.
Theinquirer.net
