Google has announced Chrome will start de-emphasizing Flash in favor of HTML5 as a way to speed up the web and save battery life.
According to the company’s blog, “90% of Flash on the web loads behind the scenes to support page analytics,” causing the plugin to slows things down. Starting in September, Chrome 53 will begin to block Flash in favor of HTML5, which is light, fast, and saves battery life, according to the company.
Google explains this is a similar change to one it made last September when Flash content became click-to-play with Chrome 42.
The company’s upcoming December release of Chrome 55 will make HTML5 the default experience, and this will happen to all sites except those that only support Flash. Users will be prompted to enable Flash when they visit a site if they are visiting sites that only support Flash.
Apple developer beta available
New beta downloads are now available for Apple developers that want to build and test apps for the latest operating systems.
The company announced beta 5 of Xcode 8 is now available. This release includes Swift 3 and SDKs that allow developers to create apps with the latest release of macOS, iOS, watchOS, and tvOS.
The company recently released the fourth beta pre-release builds of the major platforms a little over a week ago. These releases are leading up to Apple’s final public launch of its software.
Mozilla awards PyPy funding for Python 3.5 support
Mozilla recently awarded US$200,000 to PyPy, a Python JIT compiler, as part of its Mozilla Open Source Support initiative. PyPy will use the funding to implement Python 3.5 features in PyPy.
PyPy wants to see more support of Python 3.x since recent Python 3.5 development has been attracting more users. The long-term goal, according to a PyPy blog, is to “get a version of PyPy3 that is as good as PyPy2, including its performance and its cpyext layer.”
The funding from Mozilla will also be used to pay four core PyPy developers to work on the missing features and big performance issues with PyPy. By doing so, PyPy hopes that this will speed up the progress of catching up with Python 3.x significantly.
