In a move that is sure to anger those who like total control over the software on their computers, Google has teamed up with Adobe to bundle Flash player with their Chrome browser. From the announcement on the Chromium Blog:
Today, we’re making available an initial integration of Flash Player with Chrome in the developer channel. We plan to bring this functionality to all Chrome users as quickly as we can.
We believe this initiative will help our users in the following ways:
- When users download Chrome, they will also receive the latest version of Adobe Flash Player. There will be no need to install Flash Player separately.
- Users will automatically receive updates related to Flash Player using Google Chrome’s auto-update mechanism. This eliminates the need to manually download separate updates and reduces the security risk of using outdated versions.
- With Adobe’s help, we plan to further protect users by extending Chrome’s “sandbox” to web pages with Flash content.
Improving the traditional browser plug-in model will make it possible for plug-ins to be just as fast, stable, and secure as the browser’s HTML and JavaScript engines. Over time this will enable HTML, Flash, and other plug-ins to be used together more seamlessly in rendering and scripting.
Those who were hoping to see HTML5 deal a killshot to Flash, should be very disappointed.