Adobe's Flash Player will be switched off by default at the end of this year, and Chrome users will need to actively turn it on for all but a handful of top websites, Google said. According to Google, while Flash historically has been critical for rich media on the web, today HTML5 provides a more integrated media experience with faster load times and lower power consumption.

Later this year, the company plans to change how Chromium hints to websites about the presence of Flash Player, by changing the default response of Navigator.plugins and Navigator.mimeTypes. THis means that if a site offers an HTML5 experience, this change will make that the primary experience. Google will continue to ship Flash Player with Chrome, and if a site truly requires Flash, a prompt will appear at the top of the page when the user first visits that site, giving them the option of allowing it to run for that site.

To reduce the initial user impact, and avoid over-prompting, Chrome will introduce this feature with a temporary whitelist of the current top Flash sites:

• YouTube.com
• Facebook.com
• Yahoo.com
• VK.com
• Live.com
• Yandex.ru
• OK.ru
• Twitch.tv
• Amazon.com
• Mail.ru

This whitelist will expire after one year, and Google will be periodically revisited throughout the year, to remove sites whose usage no longer warrants an exception.

Chrome will also be adding policy controls so that enterprises will be able to select the appropriate experience for their users, which will include the ability to completely disable the feature.

Goggle added that it would continue to work with Adobe and other browser vendors "to keep moving the web platform forward," in particular paying close attention to web gaming.