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IE10 won't run Flash unless website is whitelisted by Microsoft

blog.rabidgremlin.com

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Re: IE10 won't run Flash unless website is whitelisted by Microsoft

#32
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Silverlight is more dead than Flash and MS killed itby alienating Silverlight developers.

The only thing keeping silverlight alive is Netflix. I wonder why they use it in first place.

Some sort of deal with Microsoft I would assume.

Re: IE10 won't run Flash unless website is whitelisted by Microsoft

#33

When we data security advocates discuss things like promiscuous trust among SSL certificate authorities and one-click scary page bypass features with browser vendors, inevitably the old adage comes up "no vendor is willing to lose market share by making its security policies more restrictive than the others". Perhaps this is a test case trying to break out of the old status quo? Disclaimer: I recently accepted a posi…

Apple broke that status quo by not allowing flash on iDevices at all. They had the advantage of the Steve/Apple "the people like it because we say they should and they think we a cool" super-power though, which MS do not currently poses, and they had both the performance (much Flash code is badly written and would devour battery life) and UI (much flash code that is out there won't work well on a touch-screen interface) caveats which are easier for the user-on-the-street (at least those I've talked to) to get their head around than security & stability problems.

This is though the first test of kicking flash in the teeth in a less restricted environment than the iDevice ecosystem, so it is still a brave move to be the first to do so (time will tell whether it is a brave move in the Yes Minister use of the word "brave"!).

One key fact that will help is that there is a growing perception amongst people who don't even know what Flash is that Flash is an out-dated technology, mainly because of the iDevice thing (if your site/app won't run on my iPad because of this "flash" thing, your flash thing is wrong not my shiny shiny). This will help MS and other browser makers as it reduces the uphill struggle convincing people that losing the feature is not too much to pay for the potential security and stability benefits.

Of course the other key factor will be what sites are on the white-list and how they address not being if they aren't (do they change tech, do they follow what-ever procedure is needed to get on the whitelist, or do they just tell their users "IE10 doesn't work here"?). I can name many video sites that MS won't want to be seen to support and won't want to make changes or pay for certification (or what-ever is needed) in order to get on the white list. A great many people use those sites regularly while pretending they don't know they exist - if those sites don't move to HTML5-video (with the problems that still exist there) or somehow get on the white-list those people might find some reason to switch to Chrome/Firefox/other (or stick with IE9) rather than upgrade to IE10.

Re: IE10 won't run Flash unless website is whitelisted by Microsoft

#34
Well, we have come to a point where no one actually cares about IE. Everyone wishes this browser wouldn't exist and most of the people use it as a tool to download Chrome and Firefox.

Having said that Microsoft's new policy is either aimed at discouraging Flash altogether OR this is just a test. They want to test users are willing accept this kind of feature where MS white-listed websites are given more power than the normal websites. Expect more to happen on this front.

Re: IE10 won't run Flash unless website is whitelisted by Microsoft

#35

I remember reading this and thinking "nice", back when there were a lot of sites where video couldn't be viewed on an iPhone: https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ Two years later, and I can even comfortably disable the Flash plugin in my desktop browser. It seems (thankfully) that Flash is fast turning into a relic of last decade. Not a bad move by MS.

I uninstalled Flash from my machine, got tired of it constantly patching/updating/hardening itself. If I want to view Flash-content I use Chrome.

Re: IE10 won't run Flash unless website is whitelisted by Microsoft

#36
post #25

As questionable of a move that is, this kind of excites the 'omg, is flash finally going to die' moment i've been waiting for, for years.

Why is that? Flash seems pretty logical to me. If you were giving the choice to either design with a single language that compiles to bytecode and runs in a vm(jit), or an array of interpretive scripts that's heavily submitted to fragmentation, which would you choose? You'd probably go for the first, as would I. Flash may be a bad implementation of good idea, but alternatives have not exactly wooed me either. To be q…

>At least with flash you had the guarantee it would crash the same on all platforms. Uhm no. The Mac-version usually was both slower and less stable than the Windows-version.

And the situation in JavaScript-land is getting better too. jQuery was developed years ago and while it still does paper over some implementation gotchas, it's main focus has shifted towards providing a nicer DOM-API. Since ES5, I started migrating away from jQuery for some more leisurely projects.

Re: IE10 won't run Flash unless website is whitelisted by Microsoft

#37
The keyword is lockdown.

I am all for giving hate to flash. It is commonly found vulnerable. It produce slow websites which eats memory and cpu. It has poor history in non-windows systems.

But in all, I have serious doubt this call was made for any reason beyond pushing users to their app-store. games? online experience? chat? By forbidding flash, companies are bit more forced to turn to apps with their products. Sure, things can still use javascript, html5 and web-sockets, but I would not trust web-sockets to be left alone if they seriously would start to threaten the app world.

Maybe I am just cynical, but follow the money argument looks to support it.

Re: IE10 won't run Flash unless website is whitelisted by Microsoft

#38

When we data security advocates discuss things like promiscuous trust among SSL certificate authorities and one-click scary page bypass features with browser vendors, inevitably the old adage comes up "no vendor is willing to lose market share by making its security policies more restrictive than the others". Perhaps this is a test case trying to break out of the old status quo? Disclaimer: I recently accepted a posi…

The iphone/ipad web browsers already don't support flash, so dropping flash support isn't entirely a new thing. I for one am looking forward to its death on more platforms.

Adobe themselves don't support Flash on mobile.

Re: IE10 won't run Flash unless website is whitelisted by Microsoft

#40

Well, we have come to a point where no one actually cares about IE. Everyone wishes this browser wouldn't exist and most of the people use it as a tool to download Chrome and Firefox. Having said that Microsoft's new policy is either aimed at discouraging Flash altogether OR this is just a test. They want to test users are willing accept this kind of feature where MS white-listed websites are given more power than th…

>most of the people use it as a tool to download Chrome and Firefox.

Not true. A lot of people still use it as in use. I was alarmingly surprised to find the number of users using IE as their main browser in my office, other than mandatory use to access company portal. And oh, my company's entire mail/issue-tracking suite works on this piece of art.

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