From almost a year in the past, Google Chrome has been trying to implement a multi-phase plan which will be capable of de-emphasizing the Adobe Flash Player.
Towards working on this plan, Google has now taken the major step of making HTML5 as the default on most of the sites opening up on the Chrome 55 browser. This latest update will be available with the new version that will be now be rolled out now to all the devices running on Mac, Windows, and Linux.
Recently, In September, when the 53 version was released, Chrome had blocked all the page analytics that was based on Flash Player, along with all its other background elements. Later, with the next version of Chrome, the browser had begun to rewrite all the embedded YouTube Flash Players to start using HTML5 as default. All these changes when knit together are here to improve the security and safety measures, reduce the consumption of power, and also lead to faster loading times.
Google Chrome version 55 has now taken the even larger step, which is something that most of the users have faced by defaulting to the HTML5. However, there are a few important sites which support only the Flash Player and these sites have been exempted from this defaulting. Even the top 10 sites of the year which have been listed on the web have been exempted from doing so and will continue to work as they are currently for about a year. These 10 sites include YouTube.com, Yahoo.com, Facebook.com, VK.com, Yandex.ru, Live.com, OK.ru, Amazon.com, Mail.ru, and Twitch.tv. However, on all the other sites, the users will be prompted to enable the Flash player when they visit the site for the first time.
CSS Automatic Hyphenation
Apart from coming up with all the usual bug fixes and also fixing the other security issues, the latest update of Google Chrome 55 has also added CSS automatic hyphenation that will now allow the browser to automatically hyphenate the words when there is a text-wrap, which will thus improve the visual consistency of all the text blocks.
Download for Offline Viewing
On the Android platform, the Google Chrome version 55 will now roll out wide features for downloading purposes, which will allow the users to view pages, images, and videos even while in the offline mode. The media controls will now have a button displayed which will indicate when a specific file can be saved. Apart from this, another new feature has also been added which will grant sites that have been placed on the home screen automatic persistent storage which will prevent the automatic clearing.
The latest update of Google Chrome version 55 is already rolling out now for the desktop version, which will be followed shortly by updates for Chrome on both Android and iOS platforms. Apart from offering an overall better web experience to the users, Google is now hoping that this change will be able to pressurize the publishers to convert over so that the users will not be forced to make that decision.