Ironically, uninstalling Flash isn’t enough to eliminate ads these days.Īmazon, for example, banned Flash ads from September 2015, but apparently as a way to make ads more likely to appear, given the ever-increasing popularity of blocking browser-based Flash: In other words, Microsoft, like Apple and Google before it, isn’t admitting that having the Flash plugin in your brower might be a security risk, and it isn’t jumping into the argument about whether the online ad industry is out of control or not. Flash content that is central to the page, like video and games, will not be paused. This significantly reduces power consumption and improves performance while preserving the full fidelity of the page.
Peripheral content like animations or advertisements built with Flash will be displayed in a paused state unless the user explicitly clicks to play that content. Microsoft doesn’t define how it decides what counts as “central,” but we imagine that the algorithm will use some combination of where the Flash came from, thus penalising third-party content sucked down from an ad network, and where it will be displayed, thus penalising animations around the edge of the page: We’re introducing a change to give users more control over the power and resources consumed by Flash.Īds will still be loaded, but Flash content that isn’t considered central to the web page you’re on will be “auto-paused,” meaning that you’ll have to click on the content before it starts playing. Nor is it really about turning Edge into an adblocker – after all, ads are vital to Microsoft’s business, just as they are to Apple and Google.Īpple pitched Safari’s Flash-blocker as the Safari Power Saver Google announced its Flash regulator under the headline Better battery life for your laptop and Microsoft is following suit (our emphasis): One of our top priorities in building Edge has been that the web should be a dependably safe, performant, and reliable place for our customers. It’s not about security, even though Microsoft’s announcement starts off with:
Of course, that’s not exactly what Microsoft is doing, nor is it quite how Microsoft has described the feature. Simply put, the Edge browser will as good as block Flash ads by default. Microsoft is following what Apple did with Safari back in 2013, and Google did with Chrome in 2015.
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