Wednesday 31 March 2010

Flash on Chrome

Some interesting multimedia news that emerged on Tuesday (via the Chromium blog) is that Google will be integrating the Adobe Flash plug-in in future builds of its Chrome browser. Already integrated in their developer build, the intention is to make the plug-in more easily available to users (i.e. no separate download), but also to improve on security: the plug-in will be updated via Chrome's own auto-update mechanisms and will benefit from future sandboxing enhancements.

This is a continuation of Google's work (proposed last summer) to produce a new browser plug-in API. The blog post mentions Adobe and Mozilla (and "the broader community" - no MS?) as helping to define this new API with the intention of allowing plug-in to be "just as fast, stable and secure as the browser's HTML and JavaScript engines." It is also expected to allow more seamless interaction between plug-in and HTML etc.

Several reports on this development have commented on how this is a response to Google's relationship with Apple (who are notoriously resistant to allowing flash on their iPhone / iPod Touch / iPads). Whether or not that is true, given the recent mutters of Flash dying in the face of HTML 5, I find it somewhat ironic that this significant Flash development would be coming from such a strong proponent of HTML 5. I also find myself wondering what impact this will have on the Google Chrome OS…

Nick Nawrattel
Lead Multimedia Developer

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