Microsoft is hilariously late to the tablet market with anything resembling a modern tablet OS. Sure, Bill Gates loved the idea of a Windows desktop with a stylus, but that ain’t no tablet, sonny! As Windows 8 (RT BBQ Edition for Tablets of Beloved Fearless Leader Of The Motherland 2008 Server Edition) was revealed, Microsoft went on and on about how duct-taping Metro to the classic Windows OS was all about choice and no compromise and blah blah blah. That said, they had the good sense to make the ARM version of Windows free from plug-ins. Most of us assumed that would mean Microsoft would join Apple’s fight to wrestle the web away from Adobe, but it turns out they’re compromising.
Rafael Rivera, Within Windows:
Two years ago, Microsoft declared that the future of video on the web would be powered by HTML 5. Today, however, a lot of web video content is still delivered via Adobe Flash technology. So, in a somewhat surprising move, Microsoft is integrating Flash directly into Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 8 and doing so in a way that does not undermine the safety and reliability of the Metro environment[…] Microsoft does work closely with Adobe, closely enough that Adobe actually provided Microsoft with source code access to Flash, allowing them to seamlessly integrate the technology into IE 10. Thus, Microsoft did not need to make an exception to its no-add-on policy for Internet Explorer Metro. By making Flash a part of IE 10, it can ensure the code meets its own standards for reliability, compatibility, security, and, probably most important, performance.
Yuck, yuck, yuck. So a half-working sorta version of Flash will be rolled into Internet Explorer 10, and Flash continues to limp its bloodied corpse forward another long, long year. This is less than happy news for those of us who fight with Flash on a daily basis. I’m sure that Windows tablets will be super fun to use, and we’ll all be punching chimps and watching splash screens for decades to come.
Source: Within Windows
