Mountain View, California — Apple might not be a big Flash admirer, but Google is. The search engine giant has fulfilled a promise to incorporate Adobe Systems’ Flash Player into the recently released stable version of Chrome 5.0.376.86 for Windows, Mac, and Linux, more importantly, enables it by default.
Google initially announced plans to incorporate Flash Player into its browser in March. But at that point, the Flash Player plug-in was made available only in the developer and beta releases, and due to some obstacle it was disabled for a time there, with plans to extend it to the stable version in the future.
A very short and straightforward announcement on the Google Chrome Releases blog broke the news: “The integrated flash player has been enabled by default . . .” Then Anthony LaForge, Google Chrome Program Manager and the post’s author, just moved on to mention five security issues that have been addressed.
Now, this latest release also resolved five security bugs, as well as the one involving a cross-site scripting danger that had been fixed earlier but that recurred.
Google mentioned at the time that Adobe’s Flash Player is “the most extensively used Web browser plug-in” but the traditional browser plug-in interface is “loosely specified, limited in capability and varies across browsers and operating systems, [which] can lead to incompatibilities, reduction in performance and some security headaches.”
As a result, Google operated with Adobe, Mozilla, and the larger community to develop a next-generation browser plug-in API. This significant step into the mainstream further highlights Google’s vote of confidence for Flash, and follows shortly behind the re-enabling of the integrated Flash plug-in in the Beta channel.
Google’s love is especially important for Adobe’s multimedia platform now that Apple is rallying hard against it. Flash provides an important constituent for creating richer aspects of the Web, notably games and streaming video, and programmers have been depending on it to bridge compatibility and feature differences among browsers. But browser makers have long chafed at how Flash programs could crash the browser and confuse its user interface, and long-running work to reproduce many Flash abilities in Web standards is steadily maturing.
According to CNet, those who do not want the Flash plug-in can type “about:plugins” into the Chrome address bar and click the “disable” button to turn it off.
Furthermore, because Flash is now delivered directly via Google Chrome’s updating system, users can expect the minimization of security risks. Finally, Google is prepared in the event that any problems crop up. Issues can be reported here: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/entry.