Mediaboss Marketing

Windows 8 Release Preview

Windows 8 Release Preview includes the sixth release previewof Internet Explorer 10. After several years of beating the drum of standards compliance and freedom from plugins, Internet Explorer 10 has surprised many with the integration of Adobe Flash. That's not the only provocative change the new browser makes: it enables Do Not Track by default, too. Standards compliance has also been further improved, and there are one or two interesting new usability features.

As previously reported, Internet Explorer 10 will include a Flash component, on both x86/x64, and ARM. This will be usable in both the desktop front-end and the touch-friendly Metro one. Flash will work on any site in the desktop browser, and on a select set of whitelisted sites, including YouTube, Netflix, and CNN, in the Metro browser.

While the x86/x64 desktop browser will allow any plugins, the Metro browser will not; nor will either of the ARM browsers. This puts Flash in a very privileged position. Even Microsoft's own Flash-like Silverlight runtime isn't getting the same treatment.

Explaining the decision to incorporate Flash, Microsoft calls it a "practical matter," and that having more sites "just work" in the Metro browser is the most important concern: users shouldn't be forced to put down their tablets and use a PC just because they come across a site that uses Flash.

The Flash plugin-that-isn't-a-plugin is based on the regular, fully-featured desktop version of Flash, not Adobe's now-discontinued mobile effort. Microsoft and Adobe have worked together to improve the battery life and security of the Flash player, with Adobe supporting Windows platform features such as ASLR, and adopting and adapting Microsoft's Secure Development Lifecycle. Contrary to our previous report, however, Adobe says that it hasn't given Microsoft access to the source code; it merely hands over compiled binaries.

Being integrated into Internet Explorer, the Flash plugin will be updated by Microsoft, through Windows Update, just as is already done in Google Chrome. The whitelist, too, will be subject to periodic updates, so we might expect to see new sites added and others removed, according to user demand and migration to HTML5 technologies.

In practice, it works about as well as can be expected. It calls itself version 11.3 (compared to the current 11.2 for other platforms), and if you visit a whitelisted site, it fires up the Flash content without any fuss or indication that it's doing so.

Microsoft says that it has worked to make the Metro Flash (though not the desktop one) more amenable to touch content: it supports double-tap and pinch-to-zoom, for example, but doesn't support mouse hover effects. This may be true, but the broader problemplenty of Flash content just isn't designed for touchremains. YouTube, for example, all works, but certain features, such as the quality/resolution menu, are a little too dainty for convenient fingering.

In spite of concerns over security and battery life, having Flash is, at this stage in the Web's life, still better than not having Flash. One can, for example, just follow links to YouTube, without being taken out of the browser experience and into a separate YouTube application, and without having to worry about whether a given video supports HTML5 viewing (not all do). In a contradictory sense, the Metro browser manages to achieve a more Web-native experience (insofar as it doesn't depend on "there's an app for that," for rich content, letting you stay within the browser) by allowing the use of non-Web technology.

Continue reading here:
Internet Explorer 10: embedded Flash, Do Not Track, and stable standards