The consumer preview of Windows 8 with no Flash support in IE 10 Metro.
Microsoft seems to have changed its mind about Adobe Flash and will include a bundled version of Flash with its upcoming Metro-style Internet Explorer 10 web browser. Previously Microsoft announced that the Metro version of IE 10 would run without plugins like Adobe Flash or even Microsoft’s own Silverlight.
The rumor of an about-face on Flash comes from leaked Windows 8 screenshots that have turned up on rumor sites WinUnleaked and WithinWindows. Microsoft declined to answer Webmonkey’s questions for this post, noting only that “Microsoft does not comment on rumors and speculation.”
Rumors and speculation though the conclusions may be, the screenshots tell the story and the story is simple: The latest developer builds include support for Flash in Metro IE 10.
To get around the “no plugins” policy for IE 10 Metro, Microsoft appears to have included the Flash runtime in the actual browser, meaning that it’s not technically a plugin. But even with the new plugin that’s not a plugin, don’t expect Flash to work everywhere. Instead, Metro IE 10′s Flash support looks more like a last-ditch effort to make sure that big-name legacy sites with popular content will work in the Metro version of IE 10.
Flash in Metro isn’t going to work everywhere, though. In fact, Microsoft will maintain a white-list of sites that can access the Flash player in Metro. Microsoft’s previously published Internet Explorer Compatibility View lists dozens of sites including Hulu, CNN, Amazon, Adobe Labs and other popular sites with older, Flash video. (Wired is on that list as well.)
It’s unclear how much of the leaked info represents a change in Microsoft’s policy toward HTML5 video and web standards. Historically, Microsoft has gone to great lengths to maintain backward compatibility and it may be that dropping Flash entirely was simply too much for the company to stomach all at once. Also bear in mind that these leaked screenshots are of early builds and things may well change considerably before the final version of Windows 8 is released.
Windows 8 is just around the corner and Microsoft wants web developers to get ready for it. We’ve yet to see any tablets running Microsoft’s next-gen Metro interface, but the company is already hard at work telling web developers how to optimize their websites for touchscreens.
The IEBlog recently posted some guidelines for building touch-friendly sites and wants developers to know what makes a successful touchscreen website.
Since Microsoft is late to the touchscreen party there isn’t too much here that savvy developers aren’t already doing for iOS and Android devices. Recommendations include touchscreen basics like using the proper HTML input types such as “tel” or “email” to trigger tailored keyboard layouts, and making sure that touch targets are large and easy to hit. Microsoft also suggests avoiding hover events since touchscreen users never trigger them (unfortunately, content hidden from touchscreens by hover events is still an all too common problem).
If you’re building responsive websites or at least tailoring your designs for touchscreens, most of these suggestions are probably already part of your workflow.
One thing that may be new to some developers is the non-standard -ms-touch-action CSS property. The -ms-touch-action property allows developers to override IE 10′s default touch behavior.
Like most touchscreen browsers, IE 10 assumes that touch events are related to browser actions — double-tapping to zoom for instance. Most of the time this is what you want, but occasionally developers may want to take over some actions, for example, drag events in a drawing app, while leaving others alone. If you have canvas element as part of your drawing app you could set the -ms-touch-action like this:
canvas {
-ms-touch-action: double-tap-zoom;
}
As the IEBlog explains, “with this configuration the user can double-tap to zoom in to the canvas element, but sliding a finger on the canvas element will send events to it rather than pan the page.”
For more details on -ms-touch-action, head over to the Microsoft Developer Network website. As far as I’ve been able to determine, Microsoft has not yet submitted -ms-touch-action to the W3C. It looks like a very handy property, so hopefully it will be submitted at some point.
As the IEBlog notes there’s much more to developing for touchscreens than just a few quick tricks. While most sites will work just fine in tablet versions of IE 10 (or any other touch screen browser) with no modifications at all there’s a rather wide gap between “work” and “amazing.” If you’d like your sites to land toward the later end of the spectrum, be sure to check out our earlier post on building a responsive, future-friendly web for some pointers.
Microsoft has developed a penchant for self-mockery when it comes to the company’s much-maligned Internet Explorer web browser. Microsoft previously put up a website dedicated to eradicating IE6 from the web, and now it’s promoting IE9 by mocking its predecessors.
As the protagonist of the video above — part of Microsoft’s The Browser You Loved to Hate promotional campaign — says, old versions of IE were good for only one thing: “downloading another browser.” That’s a sentiment echoed by countless Webmonkey commenters over the years. That said, IE is getting better.
Of course we’d be more behind the ideas in the video — that IE is actually pretty good — if it were referring to IE10, which, even in its current preview release stage is a fine browser with web standards support on par with its peers. But that’s not what the “browser you loved to hate” promotional campaign is pushing, it’s still focused on IE9.
While IE9 is faster and offers much better web standards support than previous releases, it still lags behind what you’ll find in other browsers like Chrome and Firefox when it comes to supporting the latest and greatest features on the web.
IE10 catches up with Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera, and in a few cases even surpasses some of them. IE10 really is a good browser. Seriously. Try it. But IE9? Not so much. It’s too bad Microsoft couldn’t hold off with this promo until it really did have a great browser to show off.
Microsoft has released the fourth preview of Internet Explorer 10. As is the case with previous Platform Previews, the release is aimed at developers: the new features are important to those creating rich, complex web applications, but will have less impact on web users.
However, even web developers might struggle to get too excited about the latest preview, because they probably won’t be able to run it: it only works on the Windows 8 preview release that Microsoft shipped at its BUILD conference in September.
Safely share data between domains with IE10's CORS
The new features include Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS), JavaScript typed arrays and binary file manipulation, and HTML5 video subtitling. Typed arrays and support for binary files enable much better performance for JavaScript applications that handle binary data, such as images and audio.
CORS provides a safe way for JavaScript applications to use services offered by different providers. Traditionally, JavaScript has been restricted by the same-origin policy: a script can only have full access to content that is hosted at the same domain, port, and protocol. This provides security by preventing theft of, for example, cookies and page data by objects included from other sites.
CORS allows one application to expose its data to another application even when the same-origin policy would otherwise deny such access. This is useful for creating “mashup” applications that combine web services from multiple different providers.
Microsoft has positioned its Platform Previews as a way to let developers test and provide feedback on new features so that they can inform Microsoft of bugs, and guide the development of new specifications. The first two Platform Previews for Internet Explorer 10 were made available to users of Windows 7. This preview, however, is not. If you want to use it, you’ll have to use the Windows 8 Developer Preview.
The third preview was in the same position; Microsoft did not release a Windows 7 version of Platform Preview 3. Instead, the version of Internet Explorer that shipped with the Windows 8 Developer Preview was the third preview. Though Internet Explorer 10 will support Windows 7 when released, web developers wanting to test the software now will have to use an unsupported, not-even-beta operating system to do so. And while they can do so using a virtual machine, doing so will disable most or all of the hardware acceleration features found in the browser, making it a second-rate experience.
This is a decidedly odd move. Internet Explorer 10 is going to be fundamental to Windows 8 in a way that no past version of the browser has been. HTML and JavaScript are one way for developers to create new touch-friendly Metro-style applications, and this support will be built on Internet Explorer 10.
But as important as Metro-style applications are to Microsoft, the browser will still have a substantial user base on Windows 7, and the web developers of today are far more likely to be using Windows 7 than they are Windows 8. Regular non-Metro web applications still matter. Effectively excluding this group from the preview—the group most likely to have valuable feedback and insight—makes one wonder what the entire purpose of the scheme is.
This article originally appeared on Ars Technica, Wired’s sister site for in-depth technology news.
Windows 8 will have two versions of Internet Explorer 10: a conventional browser that lives on the legacy desktop, and a new Metro-style, touch-friendly browser that lives in the Metro world. The second of these, the Metro browser, will not support any plugins. Whether Flash, Silverlight, or some custom business app, sites that need plugins will only be accessible in the non-touch, desktop-based browser.
Should one ever come across a page that needs a plugin, the Metro browser has a button to go to that page within the desktop browser. This yanks you out of the Metro experience and places you on the traditional desktop.
The rationale is a familiar one: plugin-based content shortens battery life, and comes with security, reliability, and privacy problems. Sites that currently depend on the capabilities provided by Flash or Silverlight should switch to HTML5.
Microsoft has been vigorously promoting HTML5 for the last year and a half as the best way of providing rich interactivity on the Web. HTML5 potentially has reach far beyond that of Flash, since it can target both conventional browsers and closed ecosystems (such as iOS) alike. However, until now, Microsoft’s messaging has been tempered somewhat: use HTML5 when you can, but if you can’t—if you need support for DRM-protected media streaming, for example—then it’s reasonable to switch to an alternative, plugin-based technology.
With Windows 8, however, those reasonable decisions to use Flash or Silverlight will now be heavily penalized. Technically, there’s nothing wrong with the desktop browser, of course; the rendering engine and performance will be identical between both Metro and desktop. But the experience will be substantially inferior. The desktop browser isn’t designed for touch inputs, meaning that users will either have to switch to a mouse and keyboard, or fumble around with an interface that wasn’t built for fingers. The switch to the desktop browser also appears to discard things like back button history and current page state.
This puts the Metro browser in a peculiar position. Microsoft has positioned tablets as merely a different kind of PC. That, the company argues, affords capabilities and features not possible on iPad-style devices. But PCs have browser plugins—more generally, they have the ability to use the right technology for the job. If Metro doesn’t include that flexibility, that could be seen as diminishing the “PCness” of the platform.
HTML5 still isn’t a total replacement for plugin technologies, either. The gap is certainly narrowing: Web Sockets, Web Workers, built-in support for webcams and microphones, and more, are all coming to HTML5 browsers (or are available already), and these features will obviate the need for plugins for many applications. But certain corners are likely to remain; DRM-protected video, for example, might forever be impossible in HTML5, and while many people find DRM distasteful, many broadcasters feel they have little choice but to use it.
The solution to this conundrum on the iOS platform has been the app: companies like Netflix and the BBC have applications to watch video on these devices. The result is that in the desire to push an open, plugin-free Web, companies are being forced to migrate away from the Web entirely. Silverlight developers, at least, will have an easy migration path available to them: the new Metro development environment, used for producing native Metro applications, borrows heavily from Silverlight, and making the switch from an in-browser plugin-based application to a standalone Metro application should be relatively easier. Flash developers will have to wait to see what tools Adobe delivers.
HTML5 design and developer tools also remain weak, though this situation is improving with the creation of products like Adobe Edge.
With Microsoft’s promotion of HTML5, and the precedent set by iOS, the decision to get rid of plugins in the Metro browser is perhaps unsurprising. But it’s not clear that this will truly help Windows 8; the awkward user experience penalizes users who, for no fault of their own, need to use plugins, and detracts from Windows 8′s PC claims. A switch to a more HTML5-powered Web will happen regardless—does Microsoft really need to force the issue like this?
This article originally appeared on Ars Technica, Wired’s sister site for in-depth technology news.
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