I disagree heavily. Because Chrome's proposal is essentially an elitist focus on assuming the top ten sites are the only sites worthy of using terrible code. It's unsurprising Google favors this strategy: Google will always end up in that top ten list. (And surprisingly, a lot of Google websites fallback on Adobe Flash still. Play Music doesn't work on Firefox without it.)

YouTube is no more worthy of using Adobe Flash than my personal website. They should be treated the same. If we are to disincentivize Flash, it should be disincentivized equally across the board.

If any browser were to act against and "disincentivized equally across the board" by doing something like blocking it entirely that would simply be a browser people who wanted flash content would use less.

Some people want flash, probably because they are oblivious to security concerns or simply don't care about standards and progress. These are the people we must convince. Letting them have what they "must" have while chipping away at the problem is something that might work here and now. Likely these people wouldn't even realized the browser was doing it in this case and would blame the sites for having broken flash. Despite seeming morally grey or deceptive, it could work and might not punish the browser doing it.

The funny thing is, this change would convince me to install the Flash plugin for Firefox. I've long used a different browser if I needed Flash because I didn't want the separate dependency to update that has a lot of security flaws. (Since IE/Edge and Chrome include and auto-update it). Now, I can safely install Flash on my Firefox, and know that it won't affect anything unless I explicitly permit it.

I am generally against browsers acting against user desires for compatibility. (And specifically, backwards compatibility, which the web should strive to be.) I would argue that blocking Flash is an antifeature, but providing a security gate, like not running it by default, is a security feature.

You can actually get that now. Firefox lets you set plugins to "Ask to Activate" and as far as I can tell it uses some logic like the article talks about foe whether it notifies you to activate or not. I've had it set to that and I only seem to get popups when there's a giant main video or I click a button on the page that tries to use flash for something.

The thing is Flash keeps browsers from being backwards compatible without either reverse engineering the Flash Runtime or working directly with Adobe under their terms on the proprietary Flash Player codebase.

This is why mobile browsers and unpopular systems can't access Flash content. In effect Flash breaks backwards compatibility across platforms.

I don't think the top 10 white list is the best idea, I just meant I can see where they are coming from and I don't think it is evil.

I uninstall flash entirely, never install it in the first place and/or do not use browsers that come with any proprietary plugins. I expect most people here on HN each have their own preference that largely defies attempts to clean categorization in statistical terms.

But most other users probably can be lumped into categories that aren't "misc" or "other". Anything that gets a larger chunk of web users safer and hopefully away from flash is good by me. I mostly care about the practical results, so bring on the "security gates", white lists, black lists and in general down with flash and the cesspool of security vulnerabilities it exposes people too.

Also Chrome's proposed Flash whitelist is rather US-centric and I don't think it will work well in Asia, where the popular sites differ and many more sites rely on Flash.

You should mention something on their bug tracker.

It sounds like you just don't like that approach. You didn't mention anything about how it's ineffective - or how Firefox's approach is more effective - at curbing the use of Flash.