Hi, I'm a bit late to the party but hopefully someone here can throw some light on this.
I am trying to discover the impact of the Chrome 55 Flash changes to my employer, a gaming corporation that generates billions in revenue annually. While we have been in the process of migrating game content from Flash to HTML5 over several years, our portfolio is extensive and spread over many websites in various forms that we still have a considerable user base using Flash to generate revenue. Also in some cases (eg streaming video) Flash is arguably still the better option.
I have to determine what impact the change to Chrome 55 will have on our business in terms of disrupted user-journeys, and propose a solution. We may lose players if the content they are so used to playing no longer works as expected. One thing we have discovered in our industry is users dislike change- even if its to fix something that was 'broken'. So, to see what the impact will be I am trying to use the latest versions of the browsers that hopefully already contain the proposed change.
With Chrome Canary (55) I am finding that with Flash set to Ask first, our Flash content just launches. No dialog, no broken plugin icon.
With Chrome 54 beta, I seem to get an inconsistent experience. On some of our sites it automatically loads the HTML5 version of our main web app, which may be an undesirable outcome for users who prefer the Flash version, while on other brands I get the broken plug-in icon and "Right-click to play Adobe Flash Player". What could be the reason for this inconsistency?
I have also been using Safari 10 in OS X Sierra in the (perhaps mistaken) belief that this will give a similar user journey to Chrome 55. On Safari 10 the user gets a Click to use Flash button, followed by a dialog to trust Flash, after which Flash content loads. This doesn't seem too bad a journey to me, but it doesn't seem to be the same as the proposal for Chrome.
I'm guessing navigator.plugins will no longer work as expected in Chrome, causing the standard flashVersionDetection.js to send the user to a message about the missing plugin and a link to download Flash. The short Google presentation that explains these changes mentioned that perhaps that link would be intercepted and the user returned to their Flash content.. is that the idea, or will it be more like the Safari experience? Is there something that we can do in terms of our server Flash embedding / detection code that could smooth the issue? It reminds me of the ActiveX filtering that MS introduced in IE9 - the industry responded with Javascript workarounds that meant users didn't have to jump through hoops to enable Flash. However I'm not even sure if there's anything we can do that will change the user journey in this case.
The site-engagement idea sounds better than a white-list, but what if the user accesses from a different computer than usual, or has cleared the cache?
If anyone could provide some suggestions on how I could approach the issue in terms of proposing work-arounds to my business, and investagating the impact, I'd be grateful, thanks