Microsoft has backed down, to some extent, from their “plug-in free; web standards only” position for the Metro-half of IE10. Some, but not all, Flash content will be able to play in the Metro browser. This change should be included in the Windows 8 Release Preview expected to be released in early June.
You may turn your back on Adobe but you’ll be back in a Flash.
Rafael Rivera has published a post on his Within Windows blog which he co-authored with Paul Thurrott about Flash integration with the Metro web browser. Until recently Microsoft was passionately against anything other than web standards in their Metro browser. Plugins are still not allowed in the application but that does not exclude Microsoft from embedding Flash into the browser directly.
I guess Silverlight is not popular enough…
(screenshot credit: Within Windows)
Adobe actively supports Microsoft’s efforts and has provided the source code to facilitate the integration into Metro Internet Explorer 10.
Security will rest somewhat on Microsoft’s ability to patch their software in time but will also be supported by a whitelist system. Flash for Internet Explorer 10 will only be supported on certain websites in certain ways. Unless your website is listed as requiring Flash for compatibility reasons then your website will not have access to the platform.
I am not really sure whether there is a cut or dry answer to whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. The only thing I can say for certain is that Microsoft gives the impression that they had a strong and clear vision for Windows 8 and since completely abandoned their plan.
It follows the rumors of what happened to Vista: a bunch of years working on a secure memory management architecture that was scrapped at the last minute requiring over half of the OS to be rewritten in C++.
We all know how great that turned out.
Microsoft should just buy
Microsoft should just buy Adobe – Problem solved and full integration. It would give us a reason to upgrade from windows 7 if paint was replaced by Photoshop lite, whereas windows 7 is on the track to be the next XP. If you want everyone to upgrade, create a crappy version of windows (Vista) and then follow it with something good. Instead of the tick-tock cycle of Intel, it could be the crap-good cycle of Microsoft.
They could implement Flash
They could implement Flash fully if they wanted to.
They don’t.
Buying Adobe would not help that.
They should add native
They should add native Silverlight support
Now if they would just scrap
Now if they would just scrap Metro for desktop PCs………we can only hope.
Microsoft needs to be working
Microsoft needs to be working on a driver framework for the future HSA systems aka Fusion and Haswell and the ability to have the operating system utilize the GPU’s on the average computer for general purpose tasks. If my laptop comes with an integrated GPU and a descrete GPU they should both be used by the operating system for increased perfommence, even if the integrated GPU and a descrete GPU are from different manufacturers. This driver framework should give the software coders access to all the current graphics driver APIs through a single hardware abstraction layer that then dispatches the call to the appropriate openGL, cuda, or opencl. etc. code. This driver framework should be backward and forward compatible with all Graphics driver API calls for opengl, opencl, directcopute, etc. All the graphics drivers APIs should be registered objects within the framework so that if one GPU supports more of a standard, say Opengl, than the other GPU, in the GPU’s hardware, then the appropriate call is made to the hardware that can best perform the API. All future driver updates should be posted to the framework and made available to all.
Microsoft did take as long as
Microsoft did take as long as I was thinking they would to back to on this one and it good but also bad
good now as we will not have to go to desktop IE(if you use it) and bad as with all the crap update to flash all the dam time