Safari 10 to turn off Flash by default

These standards now include most of the functionality needed to support rich media and interactive experiences that used to require legacy plug-ins like Adobe Flash.

This was confirmed by Apple engineer Ricky Mondello in a post on the WebKit blog.

The news was not part of the macOS Sierra segment of the keynote of Apple’s WWDC developer conference on Monday. Flash will still be able to run, but it’ll have to be activated on a website-by-website basis. Embedded Flash objects will have a “Click to use” placeholder rather than showing the Flash content. If a website supports HTML5, Safari will automatically use it, but if Adobe Flash is the only option, the browser will ask users for permission to let it run (if it’s installed, that is).

For most websites that detect that Flash isn’t available, but don’t have an HTML5 fallback, a message that “Flash isn’t installed” will be displayed with a link to download Flash from Adobe.

Whilst Apple has for a long time wanted to get rid of Flash, it is not just flash that will be treated like this in Safari 10. The default option will be to activate it only once. For most websites that offer HTML5 substitutes for Flash and other plug-ins, this change will cause them to send you their HTML5 versions at all times. But a much more significant move comes from Google’s Chrome, the most popular browser in the world, which has proposed similar plans, which would see Chrome turn off Flash by default by year’s end. In case the website does not provide content in HTML5, the user is notified about this. Starting with the next version of macOS, desktop Safari will begin blocking Flash by default across all websites.

Apple designs and markets consumer electronics, computer software, and personal computers.

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