Windows 8 Won't Support Plug-Ins; the End of Flash?

An anonymous reader writes "The Microsoft Windows Engineering Team has announced that the Metro interface web browser in Windows 8 will not support plug-ins — Adobe Flash included. Users will still be able to open a traditional browser interface to make use of legacy sites that rely upon plug-ins. This news follows a recent blog post by the Internet Explorer 10 team pushing the use of HTML5 video as a replacement to Flash video. With Google, Apple, Mozilla, Opera and other major players already backing HTML5 — is Adobe Flash finally dead?"

Comments

Microsoft

[ge7]

And people are still saying Microsoft is evil? They just made HTML5 video reality. It wouldn't have happened without this.

Re:Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

Using patented shit formats. So yes, they are.

Re:Microsoft

[poetmatt]

so microsoft has magically changed because they are pushing HTML5? Wow man, I'd better forget all of those antitrust cases and anti-google marketing and anti-apple marketing, plus patent trolling and patent litigation.

Leopards don't change their spots.

Re:Microsoft

[Mr_eX9]

And the story has the DRM/Straitjacket icon? Seriously, WTF? The reporting on this story is just terrible, even by Slashdot standards.

Headline: "Windows 8 Won't Support Plug-Ins ..."
Reality: "... Metro interface web browser in Windows 8 will not support plug-ins ..."

This announcement sounds perfectly reasonable to me--not having plugins in the Metro browser closes a lot of security holes and eliminates crap like Flash that's proprietary, hurts performance, etc. It's a competitive move that raises the bar for other browsers to become more secure and stop supporting things that people don't want.

Microsoft is not the evil company that this site thinks it still is. Time to find a new whipping boy, Slashdot.

Re:Microsoft

[sinthetek]

H.264 is technically better format too. That's why it should be picked, not based on some religious free software views.

Not all concerns about the Freedom to use a technology are matters of obsessive fanboyism or faith. There are plenty of pragmatic concerns associated with IP that only the most reckless would choose to ignore. A technology can be 1000x better than anything else that exists but still be effectively useless or a huge risk to end-users or business management. As an end user, I don't want my choices limited by how many technologies a prospective vendor can afford to employ. As a developer, I want to be able to create or fix technologies I encounter without much bureaucracy, being hindered by secrecy or risking having all of my hard work phased out through planned obsolescence strategies. As a business owner, I don't want the items purchased by my business to be hindered by cumbersome, nuanced, legal agreements. In my view, the diversity and innovation facilitated by Free software is almost always better even in cases where proprietary counterparts have a few more features or slightly better performance. Essentially, the freedom to do what you want has its own innate value that, while hard to quantify, should be thoroughly considered before making *any* important decisions, both technology-related and otherwise. It's not always easy to predict when and how those restrictions might hinder your opportunities in the future.

Re:Microsoft

[said213]

"Windows XP is 10 years old OS."

Spoken like a Windows customer.

Linux is an 18 year old OS... Just because a corporation wants you to move on doesn't mean that you have to... The age of an OS is irrelevant. The age of a tool doesn't render it useless... It is the availability of a better tool which renders it less useful, but no matter what advances occur, a hammer will always be a hammer.

Please make a relevant point.

Re:Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

If only they had some software that could search through millions of documents

Re:Microsoft

[neonmonk]

Just because it's Situation Normal, doesn't mean it's not All Fucked Up.

That's what happens when you say no to Microsoft.

[tomhudson]

Remember all those rumors of Microsoft wanting to buy Adobe?

This is payback for saying "No" to Uncle Stevie. You can be sure that if the deal had gone through, flash would not only have been supported, but integrated into the next release of IE.

The more important point here

[elrous0]

The lack of Adobe Flash support shouldn't be the issue here. The real thing that should concern us is that it won't support *ANY* plug-in. It seems like everything is becoming a walled garden these days. For a long time, the trend for browsers was MORE "modability" and freedom, not less. Now we're going backwards.

I just hope Mozilla doesn't get any ideas. Firefox is still the best browser out there for add-ons.

Re:That's what happens when you say no to Microsof

[MightyMartian]

Maybe, or maybe, the IE team, like the Firefox team, is awfully tired of their software being used as a vector for Flash's seemingly infinite supply of vulnerabilities.

Who cares if it's dead? Kill it -- with fire.

[Anonymous Coward]

Flash is the single buggiest, leakiest, most insecure and least reliable piece of software on your average PC.

Adobe keeps it out of scrutiny despite its many problems. Using it means relying on a company with a history of buying promising products, only to let them fester through a lack of updates. Writing code for Flash is like throwing it into a failed tributary of history.

Let's move away from these weird closed standards.

Stupid Title

[neokushan]

Once again, this is a stupid title for an article.

Here's the truth: Windows 8 supports everything Windows 7 supports. In Windows 8, there will be TWO IE browsers, though. The "regular", desktop browser which acts the same as IE9 does today (i.e. it will support plugins) and a "Metro-style" browser, which is more geared towards touch and tablet use. THIS is what won't support plugins. That's it!
If you need to use a plugin, you can push a button and be taken to the desktop version of IE. Or, you know, use a different web browser.

Makes sense

[llZENll]

Microsoft said the Metro interface will be loaded with a minimal Windows 8 back end (DLLs, drivers, etc), to make loading it quick and use less memory, if they supported plugins that would put an unknown amount of time on loading and memory usage and rely on 3rd parties for a fast browsing experience, especially on slower tablet devices.