Flash Is Now Blocked by Default in Chrome

Blocked from today

Chrome 76, released today, blocks Flash by default.

Until now, Chrome asked before running Flash content on a page. From today it simply does not run it, unless the visitor goes into the settings, switches Flash back to ask first, and then allows the site.

Hardly anybody will do that for a business they are only considering. Chrome is the most common browser on desktop computers, so for most desktop visitors, anything still built in Flash is now an empty space.

On phones it always was. No current phone runs Flash, and the iPhone never did.

What visitors now see

Depending on how the content was built: a grey box, a puzzle-piece icon, a message about Flash Player, or simply nothing where something used to be.

An intro shows a blank screen, sometimes with a skip link. A gallery shows an empty frame. A video player shows a box with no way to press play.

A menu built in Flash shows nothing at all, which leaves the visitor on the home page with no way to reach anything else.

Where Flash still hides

• Intro animations with a skip link, on older home pages.
• Navigation menus built as one animated strip.
• Galleries and slideshows with fades, captions and music.
• Video and audio players from before browsers could play media themselves.
• Page-turning brochures and online catalogues.
• Virtual tours, maps and floor plans with clickable areas.

The second is the most damaging. A missing gallery costs one page; a missing menu cuts the visitor off from every page except the one they landed on.

Why it went unnoticed

Flash fails silently. Nothing appears in an error log or an analytics report, and visitors who see an empty space rarely write to say so. They leave.

Meanwhile the site often looks fine at the office. An older computer with Flash Player installed long ago may still play it, and that is usually where the site gets checked.

Search engines never read text inside Flash reliably either, so whatever those files said about your business has been missing from search all along.

The other browsers

Chrome is not acting alone. Safari has required permission to run Flash for years, and Firefox asks before running it.

Microsoft has said its browsers will switch Flash off by default later this year. Adobe ends support for Flash at the end of 2020, and the browsers plan to remove it altogether then.

After that, Flash content will show nothing to anybody, on any device.

Finding it on your site

Update Chrome on an office computer and walk through every page, including the old ones nobody visits. Note every blank space, grey box and Flash message.

Ask whoever maintains the site to search its files for anything ending in .swf, the Flash file type, and its pages for the code that embeds one.

Check the corners: an old gallery, a virtual tour linked from one page, a brochure from a trade show years ago, a landing page from a past campaign.

A worked example

A banquet hall had a site built in 2009 with a virtual tour made in Flash: each of its three rooms as a panorama, with capacities, table layouts and a floor plan.

The catering options, the prices and the enquiry form were ordinary pages, so most of the site worked. The tour, the part couples and event planners used most when choosing a room, had been invisible on phones for years.

The manager found out this spring, when a new laptop showed a grey box asking her to enable Flash Player. The office computer, with Flash installed years earlier, had always shown the tour.

Nothing in the file could be reused directly. The capacities came from the occupancy signs in each room, the table layouts from the events binder, and new photographs were taken in May.

Each room now has a short page with photographs, its capacity for dinners and for receptions, and the floor plan as an ordinary image, readable on a phone in the middle of a planning meeting.

Replacing it, piece by piece

Intros are the easy ones: delete them, and replace them with nothing. Nobody misses them.

Menus become ordinary links, styled to look as they should. Galleries become a standard gallery that works on a phone. Video and audio play in the page itself, in formats every current browser supports.

Brochures become ordinary pages, or a PDF where something printable is genuinely needed.

Tours and clickable maps usually work best as a sequence of good photographs with short captions, which a phone handles far better than anything interactive.

Tools that convert Flash files automatically exist, and the results are rarely good. Rebuilding from the content is usually quicker and always better.

Save what is inside first

The words and images in a Flash file often exist nowhere else. The designer who made it has moved on, and the original working files usually went with them.

If the designer can be reached, ask whether those working files survive. The photographs and text inside them are far easier to reuse than anything in the finished file.

While a computer can still play the file, go through it and copy out the text and figures, and capture each screen. Once browsers remove Flash, even opening the file becomes a specialist's job.

The counter-case

Not every case needs a project.

A small Flash banner in a sidebar can simply be deleted, and an intro needs no replacement at all.

A site built entirely in Flash is the opposite case. There is nothing to repair, and the right answer is a new site rather than a series of patches.

Either way, find every piece of Flash this summer and replace it before the end of 2020 makes the decision for you.

The check

1. Update Chrome on an office computer.
2. Visit every page and note blank spaces.
3. Ask for a search for files ending .swf.
4. Copy out the content locked inside each file.
5. Delete intros without replacing them.
6. Rebuild menus and galleries as ordinary pages.
7. Check the result on a phone.

Step four is the one that cannot wait. Everything else can be rebuilt next month or next spring, but what is inside an old Flash file gets harder to retrieve every time a browser drops it.

Which browsers to test the replacement on is covered in the browsers your customers use this year.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.