Google releases Chrome 88 with no Adobe Flash Player support, stopping an internet era

Google has released Chrome 88 today, for all time removing support for Adobe Flash Player and stopping an internet era.

Flash arrived at its official end of life (EoL) on December 31, 2020, when Adobe authoritatively quit supporting the software. On January 12, Adobe likewise started blocking content from playing inside Flash, as part of its last nail in the coffin.

Google isn’t the only one in its transition to remove Flash. The decision was made along with Adobe and other browser creators, for example, Apple, Mozilla, and Microsoft, in 2017. Apple and Mozilla have likewise quit supporting Flash, and Microsoft is scheduled to stop support later this month.

As of now, as indicated by web technology survey websiteW3Techs, just 2.2% of the present sites utilize Flash code, a number that has plunged from a 28.5% figure recorded toward the beginning of 2011.

Talking at a conference in February 2018, Parisa Tabriz, Director of Engineering at Google, said the percentage of daily Chrome clients who’ve stacked at least one page containing Flash content per day went down from around 80% in 2014 to under 8% in mid-2018, a number that has in all likelihood proceeded with plummet since.

FTP SUPPORT IS ALSO GONE

Be that as it may, the present Chrome 88 release additionally accompanies different features, deprecations, bug fixes, and security patches. One of the most important changes in the evacuation of support for accessing FTP links (ftp://) inside Chrome, a process that began back in Chrome 86:

• Chrome 86 – FTP is as yet empowered by default for most clients however turned off for pre-release channels (Canary and Beta) and will be tentatively turned off for one percent of stable clients. In this version, you can re-enable it from the command line utilizing either the – enable-ftp command line flag or the – enable-features=FtpProtocol flag.

• Chrome 87 – FTP support will be disabled by default for 50% of clients yet can be enabled using the flags listed above.

• Chrome 88 – FTP support will be disabled.

CHROME NOW BLOCKS MIXED, INSECURE DOWNLOADS

In Chrome 88, Google has additionally completed an arrangement it started a year ago. With the present release, Chrome currently blocks certain HTTP file downloads.

Situations, where Chrome will stop downloads, incorporate when a client is accessing a web page that begins with HTTPS, yet the file is downloaded from a URL beginning with HTTP. Chrome considers these cases as “mixed” and “insecure” downloads, and beginning with Chrome 88 will block them totally for the clients’ protection.

OTHER CHANGES

On top of this, Chrome 88 has additionally eliminated support for the old DTLS 1.0 protocol, utilized inside Chrome as a feature of its WebRTC support.

Moreover, Chrome 88 will likewise incorporate an origin trial for recognizing idle state. When enabled by the client, the origin preliminary will permit sites to request the ability to inquiry if clients are idle on a browser, permitting messaging applications to guide notifications to the best gadget.

For some Chrome 88 clients, Google will likewise test another UI for the permission drop-down panel, the UI through which websites request permissions to access different user systems, for example, the microphone, file system, and others.

Clients will likewise have the option to look through all open tabs in Chrome 88.

Furthermore, Chrome 88 likewise drops support for OS X 10.10 (OS X Yosemite). Going ahead, Chrome on Mac will require OS X 10.11 or later.

Chrome 88 will likewise block tab-nabbing attacks, as recently revealed here by ZDNet, and the browser will likewise vigorously throttle JavaScript timer operations in background tabs to improve performance and decrease CPU and RAM use.

Another significant change is that Chrome 88 now likewise officially supports extensions worked with Manifest v3 extension rules. Extensions based on this new controversial system can now additionally be uploaded to the Chrome Web Store.

Furthermore, last but not least, single words entered in the URL bar won’t be treated as intranet locations by default in enterprise versions of Chrome 88.