Google is planning to block Flash content in Chrome later this year (Q4/2016)[1] and this includes The Settlers Online. This doesn't mean that we can't play TSO with Chrome but it means that after the change the game won't load automatically unless we accept the Flash content to be played or add TSO to the list of allowed Flash content.
This change is part of the long death of Flash and previous changes last summer [2] to running Flash content in Chrome has made playing TSO with Chrome harder. Last summer Chrome started to "intelligently" pause content (like Flash animations) that aren’t central to the webpage. This pause happens also when we put TSO in to the background tab. After a while Chrome pauses TSO and stops the connection to the game and chat servers resulting in a connection error. At the moment enabling the game background sound seems to be a workaround for this by keeping TSO from pausing in the background tab.
I would like to hear from BlueByte what's their take on these changes and how are they preparing for the day when the Flash support is completely removed from the browsers or at least one of the main browsers.
[1] https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!searchin/chromium-dev/HTML5$20by$20default/chromium-dev/0wWoRRhTA_E/__E3jf40OAAJ
[2] https://chrome.googleblog.com/2015/0...ur-laptop.html