Microsoft rolled out a bunch of patches today for Windows 8, and the most important one is that Flash in IE10 now works with a blacklist instead of a whitelist. “Well, the biggest news is that Microsoft has enabled Flash to work now in Internet Explorer 10 for RT. If you recall, Microsoft only allowed a few, specific websites with Flash to work on Internet Explorer 10 citing performance and battery life reasons. There was even a neat little work around that you could do yourself to bypass this. Now, Microsoft have reversed that decision, which they say is due to more sites becoming IE10 compatible.” There’s a firmware update for Surface RT as well, and I have to admit my Surface RT feels a little faster and smoother – especially typing. Could be reboot-induced, though.
Microsoft say the change is due to “more sites becoming IE10 compatiblemore sites becoming IE10 compatible”.
The arrogance!
It’s IE10 that needs to be compatible with websites that work fine with every other browser .. we don’t want the 90’s browser hell all over again…
You beat me to it!
I stopped making special provisions for IE LONG ago. Every time I write a site it works in all browsers without issue… then I cringe when I see what IE does with it…
My CSS for ALL non-IE browsers will look like:
In order to work with IE8 I have to add:
If I want IE7 support:
And if I want IE6:
And that is just the beginning of the crap…
–The loon
Try using Flexible Box Module on every browser. Then come back here and post your CSS.
Newsflash: Browsers have various quirks across versions.
You surely are not supporting all the webkit versions out there.
Not quite. While they’re not perfect, most of the compatibility issues I’ve seen in IE9 and 10 have been because of all the workarounds that people had to write for previous versions – as IE becomes more standards compliant, those workarounds start causing problems instead of fixing them.
I agree. That’s why they were heavily advocating feature detection (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2010/04/14/same-markup-writing-c…) instead of browser detection.
Normally frameworks like jQuery are supposed to solve this problem, however many web “so called” developers still use <IF IE> like constructs as a shortcut to real engineering.
This is in the context of touch friendly and battery conscious flash content. Not HTML. This post has to do with the white list for running flash inside of the Metro environment.
Something tells me that the world has not gone out of its way to update its flash content to be compatible with Windows RT, and rather that MS realized that it made a stupid decision and decided to reverse it while (officially) saving face.
iOS didn’t (still doesn’t, and very likely will not) support Flash, everyone complained “so how do I watch videos on blah blah blah website!?”, “how do I play Flash games blah blah blah!?”. Few years later, Adobe announced that Flash player for Android 4.x (?) will be the last version and no more further development will be done. Everyone rejoice “whoa! yeah! bye bye Flash! no more power consumption monster!”.
But how people react to the blocking policy of Flash content on IE? Before: “oh god I NEED FLASH to live! add ALL sites to the damn whitelist!” After: “heh, MSFT is trying to save face!”
People, do you really know what do you want? If you want to move away from Flash/ add-on world, then it is necessary to rewrite websites which make use of Flash/ other technologies rely on add-on, and you will have a native (HTML5/ JavaScript), faster and perhaps less power consuming implementation. Otherwise, keep using Flash, but don’t, I mean DO NOT, complain a device/ browser is consuming your precious battery power or exposing another interface for attacks.
To me, MSFT changes the policy because (1) there are too many average joe who doesn’t know Flash has many drawbacks (power consumption, security, etc.) and (2) there are tons of web developers who are too lazy to move away from Flash. I haven’t check the blacklist in the update, but I would suggest put every website that has HTML5 version in the blacklist, so that it forces developers (and users?) to realize that there is a better implementation.
When will you guys understand that HTML5 can’t still beat Flash in gaming or the control it allows over video?
This is one of the major reasons to use Flash still.
That’s why I said people (users) need to understand what they want and whether the technology they’re using can fit their needs, instead of whining “oh what a saving face act”.
The decision to use Flash isn’t normally made by web developers.
It’s a business decision made by a manager or director.
If web developers could make those decisions IE6/7 support would have ended ages ago.
ze_jerkface,
osnews is blocking me from +1’ing you..bah!
Decisions are very often made by managers instead of the developers, I’ve had my share of brainless management.
Over time, as new technologies ultimately replace flash for serving ads and glitzy animated web content, those who used to complain about flash will learn that the grass isn’t always greener on the other side. These annoying elements of the web won’t just disappear, people will pay to have them redeveloped into the HTML5 standard where they will be harder to block and probably be just as inefficient for lower power devices.
I would bet they will be more inefficient. Already now when you compare flash video and HTML5 video on, say, a netbook-class hardware …HTML5 doesn’t deliver better performance at all.
That’s really dependent on how each browser and OS handles things.
A browser that offloads to an OS media framework, that uses codecs that are as accelerated as possible, could do well.
That said, I actually recently opted out of YouTube’s HTML5 test, because the Flash player was simply far more reliable – buffering is handled much better, it doesn’t stutter as much, seeking is more reliable, etc., etc.
Content providers will have to update their content for iOS based devices and modern Android hw anyway. Microsoft just pu**ied out and did the wrong thing. You can always count on MS to do the wrong thing.
Enjoy the flashier ads you now see in your browser, Thom.
Louder, busier, more animation.
I’m sure it is worth the shorter battery time.
You can always disable Flash player, and enable it when you really need it. This is what I do on my computers.
Wait, wait wait…
Are we talking about Windows 8 desktops and laptops, Windows 8 tablets, or Windows RT tablets? I ‘ve kinda lost the ball with all those Windows.
Enabling Flash on Windows 8 desktops and laptops in Metro (Modern) mode makes sense (at least from MS’s view). They want Metro to be a successor to classic desktop, so it has to do everything the classic can do, without having to drop back to classic to view a flash page.
But on tablets? No, no, no! In the best case scenario, you have flash sucking your battery dry when you can easily visit the “mobile” version of the site and get an HTML5 version of the video, in the worst case you have animated ads moving under the screen like cockroaches.
Microsoft should have enabled flash for desktops and laptops and disabled it for tablets (ARM and Intel). But, with Windows 8 being allegly the same both for Intel tablets and desktops/laptops, can they do that? Putting the same “Windows 8” both for desktops/laptops and Intel tablets was a dumb idea.
Edited 2013-03-13 15:18 UTC