This is interesting news. According to WinUnleaked.tk, and given credence by Rafael Rivera and Paul Thurrot, Adobe has given Microsoft the source code to Flash, so that Microsoft could fully integrate it into Internet Explorer 10 for Windows 8. Interesting move, and probably not a bad one considering just how popular Flash still is, especially for games.
Great, so IE will now crash twice as much now that Flash is integrated into it.
This is like integrating feces into diarrhea.
What a pathetic and desperate move from Microsoft/Adobe.
Edited 2012-05-23 22:06 UTC
I use IE8 & 9 pretty much everyday, and crashes are rare.
Flash has not crashed on me in ages, the last time I had a crash was because my work PC (an ageing P4) had bad memory.
I appreciate that flash sucks on non-Windows Systems. I site in a room with 100 Windows PCs all running IE, we don’t have many problems.
Edited 2012-05-24 09:12 UTC
Sounds to me like you have about 100 problems.
As I said we don’t have any problems with IE, nice attempt at trolling. On OSAlert everyone loves the “lol MS is the suckers” comments.
No I appreciate that IE doesn’t have the best security record, but it is getting better.
Mozilla Firefox does not have an official MSI, so we have people running very old (and unsupported versions of Firefox, with known security flaws). However everyone is running a fully patched version of IE8 or IE9 thanks to Group Policy.
Also many can scoff, rendering wise there is a lot of things IE8 & 9 do right that other browsers do wrong.
For example third party XML such as Facebook Markup Language won’t be rendered on a site unless the correct XML Namespace is supplied in the HTML root node when serving XHTML. It is invalid XHTML yet all the other browsers will quite happily render it given the correct FB.js file.
There are other examples where IE actually conforms to the specification and other browsers don’t.
Juvenile comments like yours are just tiresome, and does nothing to improve the situation.
However you got upvoted … so it might improve your e-penis.
Fuck off douchebag.
Except you’re the one trolling.
How is that .. I presented facts rather than off the cuff comments.
If I am trolling by presenting facts (such as my XML namespace comments) you got problems.
Edited 2012-05-25 07:25 UTC
That’s nice for you. The reality is that Flash and Acrobat Reader are the two top causes of browsers crashing.
Yes because the year is still 2009.
Now all they need is integrating Java aswell, then it’ll be the unsafest browser on th.. oh wait, they already were!
I do think this might give them a competitive speed advantage on flash games though.
The Microsoft JVM was discontinued in 2003?
Because the current version of Windows is Windows XP RTM.
With Internet Explorer doing this and closed-source Chrome doing something similar (and becoming the only modern Flash on Linux since Adobe is dropping NPAPI support), it’ll be interesting to see if anyone noteworthy starts trying to cause Adobe trouble for advantaging certain browsers over others.
Edited 2012-05-23 22:13 UTC
Adobe is not favouring Chrome over other browsers. They are making Flash available for anyone who adopts that plug-in standard. Any browser teams willing to implement the feature will be able to run future versions of Flash on Linux. Chrome just happens to be the first to do so.
So why doesn’t Adobe hand over the source code to Flash to Mozilla, Opera and Apple? Why doesn’t Adobe simply release it under an OSI-approved license?
As long as there was one, and only one version of Flash, tweaked only when absolutely necessary to make it cross-platform, and not 30 different forks of it.
Adobe failed at doing that even under their own control.
Most of the problems have now been resolved on Linux thanks to the Pepper API.
Pity Mozilla have no interest in implementing it.
Mozilla is right. Better to focus on pure HTML solutions, instead of supporting an obsolete technology like Flash.
How is it obsolete? … I love it how people throw these words about.
When the Unreal 3 Engine runs in HTML5 … give us a call.
And No WebGL is not the answer …
http://www.contextis.com/resources/blog/webgl/
http://www.contextis.com/resources/blog/webgl2/
Like it or not Flash works fine. Mozilla’s market share is tanking because they are embracing Idealism over Pragmatism.
Edited 2012-05-25 08:24 UTC
Only a crack smoking idiot would say that.
What a well reasoned argument.</sarcasm>
Answer to what? WebGL is good for what it’s good. For really heavy games you don’t need a browser – you need real OpenGL anyway.
Did you read the links. WebGL is simply insecure and can never be secured.
Because they sell tools such as Adobe Flash Creator, if they open sourced it they would have incompatible forks and any content made with Flash Creator wouldn’t work correctly.
This would most likely piss off many of their existing customers.
Edited 2012-05-24 09:53 UTC
Opensourcing isn’t a magic bullet. It will undermine Adobe’s business model (and if you license the code from them, they have always allowed external companies to use the Flash engine.) You may not like or agree with Adobe creating closed source software and platforms, but you need to appreciate that changing the model for a specific product line is not done on a whim.
I’m guessing all of the companies you list could also license the source from Adobe. I also assume they don’t because Adobe provide a free plugin for the majority of the world’s consumer platforms. Of those excluded, many specifically do not support Flash by choice (iOS) or have some kind of support (Linux via Chrome.)
Source code NOT EQUALS plugin
Looks like Microsoft actually read all the flame comments they got when announced Win8 will be flash-less a month or two ago.
Kinda hard when the plugin does not exist. You must be living under a rock. Adobe will no longer support Flash on Linux, mobile devices (phones / tablets, etc.) or embedded devices (media players, etc.).
No the NPAPI version, Pepper API is going to be supported by Google (via Chrome) on Linux.
More like the only one, at present. Last I heard, Mozilla decided that they weren’t going to implement Pepper because Google did as they do with Android, unilaterally designed it, and said “Here it is, Take it or leave it.”
Edited 2012-05-24 05:38 UTC
How dare Google actually solve the problem, rather than just campaigning for the end of Flash.
Except they did not “solve” anything. The only thing that would solve the problem is Flash going away.
At the end of the day, there is nothing wrong with Flash when it is used correctly.
Unfortunately the Zealots roll in and everyone jumps on the HTML5 bandwagon.
How about releasing the source code for everyone?
Ain’t that better?
All geeks claim they don’t want Flash anyhow so why start whining now?
To fix it, of course,
We don’t need to improve Flash, we need to improve HTML5.
Because we worry about popular platforms keeping Flash around while our preferred browsers lose access to our favourite sites and services.
‘Not a bad one’?
Seriously…?
Like windows could use some additional attack vectors for malware. Or some additional instabilities.
They are so digging their own grave.
Well, good riddance. Windows has been around too long anyway.
http://www.osnews.com/permalink?519244
The Flash run time will not be available for all web sites using Flash as mentioned in the article..
“Flash is supported for only those popular but legacy web sites that need it. This feature is not broadly available for all sites.”
these days.
Oh, well. Maybe it won’t be that bad since Metro apps are sandboxed.
I wonder if Microsoft will also support Silverlight, as there are some cool sites that use and/or require it, such as WorldWideTelescope.org, Photosynth.net, Netflix.com. Hmmm, for Netflix, I imagine there will be a dedicated metro app, so it doesn’t matter if the netflix site itself supports silverlight streaming on metro. Maybe there will be dedicated Photosynth and WorldWide Telescope apps too; or maybe Microsoft will convert them to HTML5 (though I don’t know if HTML5 is up to the task).
I suspect those sites will give way to apps and/or HTML5 versions. Silverlight support would be nice for existing LOB app support though, but it is still accessible from Desktop IE. If I were doing the integration, Flash would be implemented using Silverlight (video playback could just be a managed codec). This would provide better security overall, with code that’s been completely SDLC-vetted (and optimized for Windows’ power management and sandboxing features), but the current solution does provide quicker time to market, with fewer compatibility worries, and likely still means a more secure Flash for Windows.
Third-party metro apps are sandboxed, but IE is probably not.
ie9 is already sandboxed on windows 7
It is true that since IE 7, Internet Explorer itself is supposed to have very little file access permissions, provided that its “Protected mode” functionality is enabled at least. However, its Trident engine is entrenched so deeply in Windows, managing parts of such critical functionality as system dialogs, the file explorer or the control panel, that it can almost certainly give orders to higher-privileged components of Windows, which partially voids the usefulness of this sandbox functionality.
Edited 2012-05-24 12:33 UTC
Fat lot of good it does, too.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2012/04/10/ie-9-0-6-available-vi…
IE was, is, and will remain a security nightmare.
Actually, Acrobat and Java are worse than Flash. But it definitely is in the top 3.
I am guessing that it only concerns x86,x64 versions of windows 8. Let’s hope that microsoft will integrate it into its “windows update” mechanism, rather that having a third party update system or going to a separate download website.
Considering how the ARM version would be closed, and on how “secure” they want to get the platform, I would be surprise if this version get the flash treat.