So Chrome is finally going to start smacking down Flash ads, and I have never been so ready to click "yes" on a browser update in my life.
Google put a note out this week saying that starting September 1st, Chrome is going to auto-pause most Flash content on a page that isn't the main thing you're there for. Video ads, the little animated banner that follows you down the sidebar, that weird spinning logo thing some agency charged a client $4,000 for in 2009, all of it gets frozen into a gray box with a little play button until you click on it. The stuff that's actually central to the page (an embedded Flash game, whatever) still runs fine. It's specifically aimed at the parasitic stuff.
I want to be clear about how overdue this is. I've been running this blog since November 2011 and I don't think there's been a single year where I haven't complained about Flash at least once. Remember when a laptop fan would just start screaming because you had four tabs open and one of them had an auto-playing Flash ad buried three iframes deep? I do. I lost an entire MacBook battery cycle to a Flash ad for a car insurance company back in like 2013 and I've never forgiven anyone involved.
The interesting part isn't even that Chrome is doing this, it's that Google is the one doing it. This is the same company that for years wanted Flash content indexed and playable because a huge chunk of the early web (including a lot of ad inventory Google itself was selling) ran on it. Now the incentives have flipped. Mobile browsing means battery life actually matters to people in a way it didn't when everyone was tethered to a desktop with a wall outlet six inches away, and Flash is murder on battery. HTML5 video is finally good enough that there's no real excuse left. YouTube switched its default player over to HTML5 back in January, and nobody really noticed, which is sort of the point.
If you run a site with any ad units on it, or you're a freelancer who still has a client running a Flash-based ad campaign (they exist, I promise, I know one), this is worth actually paying attention to instead of skimming past. A frozen gray box where an ad used to be doesn't just look bad, it tanks whatever the advertiser is paying for, because nobody converts on a click-to-play placeholder. If you've got any say in it, now's the time to push people toward HTML5 or a plain image with a link. I'd argue you should've done this two years ago, but here we are.
A couple practical things if you're dealing with this on your own sites:
- Check your ad network's dashboard for anything that still says ".swf" as the creative type. Most of the big networks (I'm looking at AdSense specifically) have had HTML5 upload options for a while now and a lot of publishers just never bothered switching because the old thing still technically worked.
- If you embedded anything with Flash directly, a video player, a slideshow widget, some interactive thing a designer built you in Flash Professional back in 2011, go actually load the page and see what it looks like paused. Sometimes the fallback poster frame is fine. Sometimes it's a blank rectangle because whoever built it never set one.
- Don't wait until September 1st to find out. Test it now.
I'll admit there's a small, petty part of me that's going to miss having a villain. "Flash ads are terrible" has been such a reliable, easy thing to be right about for so long that I'm almost nostalgic in advance. Almost. I still have the Flash Block extension installed on this machine out of pure habit and I'm honestly not sure I'll ever bother uninstalling it, even after this rolls out. Old scars, I guess.
Anyway. Small win for anyone who's ever had a laptop fan spin up for no visible reason while reading a news article. Take it.