Flash will become click-to-run in Edge, Chrome in 2017

A few sites will be whitelisted; everywhere else will have it disabled by default.

The Windows 10 Creators Update, due in spring next year, is going to make almost all Flash content click-to-run in the Edge browser.

The Windows 10 Anniversary Update already applied click-to-run to most online advertising, following in the steps of Safari and Chrome. In the next major update, Microsoft will extend the restrictions on Flash. By default, Flash will not be loaded or offered to sites, and users will have to opt to enable it on a site-by-site basis. A handful of popular, Flash-dependent sites will see the plugin enabled automatically, with Microsoft intending to cut down this whitelist as more and more sites switch their interactive content to be native HTML5.

Earlier this year, Google announced a similar plan for Chrome. Currently, 1 percent of users of the stable Chrome 55 release have click-to-run enabled by default, along with 50 percent of users of the Chrome 56 beta release. When the stable Chrome 56 release is made in February, Flash click-to-run will be enabled by default for everyone. Google also intends to whitelist the ten most popular flash-dependent sites, though it says that this whitelist will only be in place for a year.

Both companies say that cutting out Flash in this way will improve performance and battery life while also reducing exposure to security vulnerabilities. HTML5 has substantially grown to offer comparable equivalent functionality for Flash in almost every scenario, and Web developers have been phasing out their use of Adobe's plugin accordingly.

Mozilla also has a plan to ditch Flash at some point in 2017.

This movement away from Flash hasn't been quite universal, however; there's still a thriving community of developers building browser-based games, and many of these continue to use Flash, even when newly developed. The tooling and developer familiarity offered by Flash for this richly interactive content is still arguably superior than that on offer to most HTML5 developers, and it's not currently clear quite how this gap will be addressed. Even aside from new titles, there's a substantial artistic legacy encapsulated in these games, and just as is the case with old console games, preserving and safeguarding that legacy in the face of technological advance is neither easy nor straightforward.