Windows 8 Tablets Will Not Run Flash

Operating System - By admin on Saturday, January 21, 2012 - 09:40

Microsoft has confirmed that tablets using Windows 8 OS will not use Flash but instead use a HTML 5, plug-in free Metro browser. At the moment, as far as we are aware, Adobe Flash will still be supported on the Windows 8 OS for both laptops and PCs.

Although this news seems shocking, it is in fact not that surprising. As Dean

Hachamovitch, who leads the IE team for Microsoft noted on the MSDN blog, "The reality today is that sites are already rapidly engineering for a plug-in free experience. Google, for example, recently launched their HTML5 YouTube site for phones."

Hachamovitch goes on to say that he believes that tablet users will prefer to use HTML 5, plug-in free Metro browsing because: " Running Metro style IE plug-in free improves battery life as well as security, reliability, and privacy for consumers. Plug-ins were important early on in the web’s history. But the web has come a long way since with HTML5. Providing compatibility with legacy plug-in technologies would detract from, rather than improve, the consumer experience of browsing in the Metro style UI."

Plug-in Free becoming the norm

In fact, research by Microsoft has discovered that plug-in free sites are becoming more popular than plug-in sites. Microsoft "examined the use of plug-ins across the top 97,000 sites world-wide, a corpus which includes local sites outside the US in significant depth. Many of the 62% of these sites that currently use Adobe Flash already fall back to HTML5 video in the absence of plug-in support. When serving ads in the absence of plug-ins, most sites already perform the equivalent of this fallback, showing that this approach is practical and scalable. There’s a steep drop-off in plug-in usage after Flash, with one control used on 2% of sites and a small collection of controls used on between 0.5% and 0.75% of sites."

But Why Retain Flash for PCs?

So if HTML 5 is becoming the norm, why is Microsoft retaining the use of Flash in Windows 8 OS for PCs and laptops? Well, this is so that business users and home consumers can still visit and use sites and applications that require ActiveX controls. Even so, Microsoft envisages most of these sites moving to HTML 5 in the near future.