Windows 8 Won't Support Plug-Ins; the End of Flash? 661
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?"
Incoming money-quote: (Score:4, Informative)
Nope (Score:5, Informative)
In Windows 8, IE 10 is available as a Metro style app and as a desktop app. The desktop app continues to fully support all plug-ins and extensions.
Re:The more important point here (Score:4, Informative)
there is a big difference between add-ons & gadgets & plugins.
if you look at FF & Chrome their extensions/add-ons work in a predefined and hopefully secure environment. IE"s "plug-ins" work at raw executable code level at the users permission level and there for can not easily be contained by the browser, hence how easy it is to use a hole in flash to infect the system.
MS would be stupid not to allow extensions/add-ons in the same manner that FF and Chrome and i believe Opera does. But killing "plug-ins" is by far a great decision for security and overall long-term usage.
The only lawful response is Cancel (Score:5, Informative)
The counterparts that get automatically installed the first time you try to play an h264 file.
The first time the user tries to play such a file, you get a warning to the effect "This media requires a non-free decoder. Installing and using this decoder may violate patent law or other restrictions in some countries. Click Install only if you have verified that these restrictions do not apply to you." If a computer is on United States soil, the only lawful response is Cancel. After the user has clicked Cancel, the dialog shows up again for every subsequent H.264 video.