Adobe Flash’s Slow Death Continues With Google Chrome Intelligent Pause

There are myriad of ways to improve the battery-life of a laptop, but one of the best is to disable CPU-intensive (or perhaps even GPU-intensive) browser plugins. Adobe's Flash is a perfect example of this. While Flash animations can be detrimental with regards to battery-life, it's made worse when an element in the background is running a video. It's just bad news, and Google realizes it all-too-well.

That being the case, the company will soon be introducing a new feature to its Chrome Web browser that lets users disable all Flash content by default, or let Chrome decide which content should be displayed. In the latter case, if some Flash is deemed to be unimportant to the website experience (such as side elements), it will be disabled, whereas a Flash-based video player inside of the content area may automatically be enabled.

If Chrome is wrong in guessing that a Flash element wasn't important, users can simply click on it to activate it. This functionality mimics popular browser extensions that have existed for a long time, so it's great to see that Google is giving its users one more extension to uninstall, if they happened to use it.

Google teases that it will be rolling out even more power improvements in the months ahead, and encourages us to "stay tuned". Believe us, we will!