IE10 won't run Flash unless website is whitelisted by Microsoft
blog.rabidgremlin.com
blog.rabidgremlin.com
I am all for giving hate to flash. It is commonly found vulnerable. It produce slow websites which eats memory and cpu. It has poor history in non-windows systems.
But in all, I have serious doubt this call was made for any reason beyond pushing users to their app-store. games? online experience? chat? By forbidding flash, companies are bit more forced to turn to apps with their products. Sure, things can still use javascript, html5 and web-sockets, but I would not trust web-sockets to be left alone if they seriously would start to threaten the app world.
Maybe I am just cynical, but follow the money argument looks to support it.
1. Flash isn't prohibited on Windows RT devices. This is distinctly different from Apple's approach with iOS, and Google has removed Flash from Android. [1]
2. Existing Flash websites will run on Windows RT devices. Windows RT will ship with the desktop version of IE10. [2]
Microsoft has made explicit what we all know. There are some websites that use Flash appropriately and in a way which benefits the person browsing, and there are websites whose use of Flash makes the web suck.
Having browsed the web for two years with Flash disabled by default, I'd add that here are a lot of sites which just use Flash for the sake of using Flash. When I don't see it, I still get the content I was seeking.
[1] http://www.readwriteweb.com/mobile/2012/08/adobe-flash-on-an...
Quite frankly, I don't trust them with that power. This is the company that just got off of "monopoly probation".
I'm starting to really tire of this trend where developers lock away even power user settings (like the ability to decide what fucking plugins run in your browser) in the name of "security".
> We place sites with Flash content on the CV list if doing so delivers the best user experience in Internet Explorer 10 with those sites. For example, how responsive is the content to touch? Does it work well with the onscreen keyboard, or affect battery life? Do visual prompts comply with the Windows Store app user experience guidelines? Sites that rely on capabilities (for example, rollover events and peer-to-peer (P2P) functionality) that are not supported within Windows UX guidelines for Windows Store apps, and don't degrade gracefully in their absence, are better off running in Internet Explorer 10 for the desktop with Flash.
It sounds to me like they're just saying they don't want plugins screwing up their shiny new UI. If you want to run your arbitrary plugins, just do it with the classic desktop version of the browser.
The end user's shiny new UI. That's why this leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Why not just make Flash click to enable? That'll stop ads and most other shenanigans while still making things that users want to access (and haven't been blessed by MS for whatever reason) still able to access them.
"Developers with sites that need plug-ins can use an HTTP header or META tag to signal Internet Explorer 10 to prompt the user to switch to Internet Explorer for the desktop."
Again, Windows RT is expected to ship with the desktop version of IE 10. This means that for most practical use cases, any Flash website can be browsed by any version of Windows 8 - except phone which currently doesn't support Flash at all.
Microsoft didn't come up with the walled garden. They didn't lead the industry in the rush to vilify Flash. And they certainly aren't at the forefront of collecting and selling user data to advertisers and marketers.
That train has already left the station, with iOS and Apple unable to keep iDevices in stock.
Do you have a better way to add functionality to a closed source browser?
Before you say "HTML5", not there yet, and didn't exist in the period back when Flash became popular.
Please stop being so dogmatic, this is software development, not religion.
Another benefit, that practice immediately reveals the odd flash-only site, showing me a big empty box. I usually bail immediately on those, because there's usually no good reason to do that, so I assume there's a bad reason.
That said, I would rather be the one deciding whether to watch flash or not.
Nope, Adobe did. Even your link says so.
Never thought I'd be saying this, but it looks to me like they want to push everyone away from Flash towards web standards like HTML5.
> I would not trust web-sockets to be left alone if they seriously would start to threaten the app world
Windows 8 hasn't even been released yet, so 'app store' apps hardly hold an entrenched position worth protecting. MS needs open standards and a thriving crossplatorm ecosystem more than anyone.
I am cynical. I believe MS want to copy what ever method is currently earning any other software company most money in the shortest term. App-stores keep being portrayed as the one great place where money is earned on software. Like many, I am also tired beyond reason of the word "app". I still see ads in the street that talk about "get our app!" as it would be completely different to say "Buy our software". Sooner or later, that bubble will burst, but until it does, I will doubt the motives of any move that cut of competitor in favor of an app-store which one single entity control.
http://chrome.blogspot.com/2012/08/an-even-more-secure-flash...
Microsoft could have taken the approach of running Flash in it's own Win8 app container, but apparently wanted to put as little effort into it as possible.
The Flash whitelist is only for the formerly-called-Metro immersive browser that will primarily be used on touch-based tablets. It does not affect desktop IE10.
Many Flash apps were designed for big screens and mouse interaction where pointer precision is great. Now you're throwing them onto a screen that's smaller and using a fat finger to emulate a pointer when the Flash app's target areas weren't designed for that.
Now certainly, some Flash apps will work. Other apps will not because they just weren't built with this environment in mind. If the user ends up running one of the apps that fail, they will have a bad experience. It happens all the time with the iPad where Flash doesn't work at all.
To improve the experience, you could make a whitelist of apps that work, or a blacklist of apps that fail. Which implementation you might choose would depend on whether you expect more good or bad apps, the complexity of managing the list, the impact of failure on the user, etc.
Is this really so controversial?
Using your argument they should also whitelist websites because some of them have bad interfaces or inappropriate content. For example some drop-down menus only open on hover and so won't work with touch interfaces.
https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/
Two years later, and I can even comfortably disable the Flash plugin in my desktop browser.
It seems (thankfully) that Flash is fast turning into a relic of last decade. Not a bad move by MS.
Having said that Microsoft's new policy is either aimed at discouraging Flash altogether OR this is just a test. They want to test users are willing accept this kind of feature where MS white-listed websites are given more power than the normal websites. Expect more to happen on this front.
Not true. A lot of people still use it as in use. I was alarmingly surprised to find the number of users using IE as their main browser in my office, other than mandatory use to access company portal. And oh, my company's entire mail/issue-tracking suite works on this piece of art.
You'll need a big monitor, as this was a quick hack and doesn't function very well on small screens, but you can see the number of people using IE across all of the sites our JS is loaded on in real-time.
>>doesn't function very well on small screens
Works just fine with "CTRL -"
I then got thinking, as a default for a browser that will end up in corporate desktops and home users that this is actualy a realy nice move. I'm sure there will be some registry hack to negate this, but for the common user who lacks the ability to do that are perhaps best left with there internet L plates attached.
In summary, big fat +1 from me on this as anybody who is able to bypass this hurdle will be alot less likely to fall foul of this safty net. Less infected PC's, less spam, less crap in general.
Lets not also forget the big benefit this betowes upon us, less calls from friends who's PC's/Internet seems to be running a little slower and after 15 minutes on the phone you realise it will be easier to see them.
Almost everybody uses some version of Windows or other and so .NET is there more or less.
Note that desktop IE 10 supports Flash and other plug-ins just fine. I run Windows 8 preview on the computer in my ham shack and I find that do almost all my browsing with the desktop IE anyway. I just use the Metro IE to visit QRZ, which is a web application for looking up call signs and logging contacts.
Flash may be a bad implementation of good idea, but alternatives have not exactly wooed me either. To be quite honest; they all seem equally flawed to me. The fact that jQuery, Bootstrap, and others originated out of overcoming fragmentation pretty much proofs that point. Also different JavaScript engines give you different performances and have different bottlenecks. At least with flash you had the guarantee it would crash the same on all platforms.
And the situation in JavaScript-land is getting better too. jQuery was developed years ago and while it still does paper over some implementation gotchas, it's main focus has shifted towards providing a nicer DOM-API. Since ES5, I started migrating away from jQuery for some more leisurely projects.
But with flash the fatal problem is, and always was, that the only viable implementation of the interpreter is a proprietary and buggy blob, not even available for all platforms. Apart from that being a plugin also made it clunky, too much like a "java applet" (it never integrated into a page as well as javascript does).
If it had been based on an open specification (like HTML5 is now) then it could have been successful. Different browsers could have competed for the fastest and most secure JIT, like they do with javascript now. The end result would probably have been great. Alas...
Even non-technical people I hear complaining almost daily about what a piece of crapware the Adobe Flash plugin is, after it crashed for the zillionth time. Everyone wants flash to die, as the last sites that still require it either move to HTML5 or are replaced.
Perhaps this is a test case trying to break out of the old status quo?
Disclaimer: I recently accepted a position at the big M itself.
This is though the first test of kicking flash in the teeth in a less restricted environment than the iDevice ecosystem, so it is still a brave move to be the first to do so (time will tell whether it is a brave move in the Yes Minister use of the word "brave"!).
One key fact that will help is that there is a growing perception amongst people who don't even know what Flash is that Flash is an out-dated technology, mainly because of the iDevice thing (if your site/app won't run on my iPad because of this "flash" thing, your flash thing is wrong not my shiny shiny). This will help MS and other browser makers as it reduces the uphill struggle convincing people that losing the feature is not too much to pay for the potential security and stability benefits.
Of course the other key factor will be what sites are on the white-list and how they address not being if they aren't (do they change tech, do they follow what-ever procedure is needed to get on the whitelist, or do they just tell their users "IE10 doesn't work here"?). I can name many video sites that MS won't want to be seen to support and won't want to make changes or pay for certification (or what-ever is needed) in order to get on the white list. A great many people use those sites regularly while pretending they don't know they exist - if those sites don't move to HTML5-video (with the problems that still exist there) or somehow get on the white-list those people might find some reason to switch to Chrome/Firefox/other (or stick with IE9) rather than upgrade to IE10.
So banning plugins (including Flash) on a desktop OS browser seems like a significant new move.
But Apple advertised the iDevices using the phrase "the whole Internet", which to many very much includes Flash.
I've been here before with WindowsCE and WinMobile. :(
Submitting your site for consideration for Internet Explorer compatibility As stated previously, developers who have sites that require Flash Player can mark the page with a META tag (or serve a header) indicating that the site requires a plug-in. This causes Internet Explorer 10 to prompt the end user to open the site in Internet Explorer 10 for the desktop. If a site is on the CV list as compatible with Internet Explorer 10, Internet Explorer 10 will always open it with Flash Player enabled and the user won't be prompted to open in Internet Explorer 10 for the desktop.
Whatever your stance is on Flash, this is a scary development if you don't like walled gardens.
Personally, I think it's a fight worth fighting, since they really could go that route if they got enough buy-in on it. And I don't doubt they would, if they thought it was in their best interests. That's what corporations do.
Luckily, Linux has recently gotten a lot of support from indie developers via Kickstarter (and the players' demands for a Linux version) and it's starting to look more viable as a platform for commercial games. We can hope.
Read this three part article about the confusion. http://www.withinwindows.com/2012/09/28/notch-doesnt-hate-wi...
Having a language that is not inherently designed to be run in a sandboxed environment should not be allowed to run in a browser.
Either they're expecting everyone who uses flash in a significant way to get whitelist approvals (and how many people do they have vetting those, anyway?), or they don't mind a period where, from the user's perspective, stuff randomly breaks for reasons that are not likely to be apparent. (Even if you tell them "well, it's how you started the browser fifteen minutes ago", they'll ask, "and why should that matter?" They have a point.)