[joshfraser]

Besides ads. And Google is first and foremost an advertising company. Don't hold your breath for that to become the default in Chrome.

[vertex-four]

And that's pretty much why Google built Google Web Designer[0] - because advertisers are going to want their media to run on all browsers, even ones without Flash.

[0] http://www.google.co.uk/webdesigner/

[gumby]

And this is why we must treasure and keep Flash -- so we can easily block the kinds of people who use it.

Filtering out HTML5 video ads is harder (though if you block everything set to auto play you do OK).

[vezycash]

#(though if you block everything set to auto play you do OK)

How do i do this on chrome?

[gumby]

I do all my rewriting with a proxy (in my case glimmer blocker, though I also had to implement my own man-in-the-middle SSL tool to make it work with https connections). I simply rewrite URLs, strip referrer tags, respond with empty files for domains I don't like, and rewrite pages to remove crud. It speeds up my browsing experience immensely and coincidentally improves my privacy somewhat.

I seems brain damaged to me to do it via a browser extension since I use multiple browsers, not to mention other programs that make http/https/ftp connections (e.g. RSS reader, mail reader etc).

[SquareWheel]

Google Flash ads are rare, and I'm sure they'd be happy to move away from them entirely in favor of HTML5 technologies.