Microsoft drops support for Flash in Windows 8 Metro interface
Microsoft has said that it is dropping support for Adobe Flash in its Windows 8 Metro interface, although it will still be supported Windows 8 desktop interface and the desktop version of IE.
The new Windows operating system was unveiled on Wednesday.
Dean Hachamovitch, head of IE development at Microsoft, said in a blog post: “We 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.
“On Windows 8, consumer sites and “line of business” applications that require legacy ActiveX controls will continue to run in the desktop browser, and people can tap “Use Desktop View” in Metro style IE for these sites. For what these sites do, the power of HTML5 makes more sense, especially in Windows 8 apps.”