If you've been following along you'll know that Microsoft announced back on September 2011 that IE10 running in what they used to call "Metro Mode" would no longer be running addons including Adobe Flash.
This generated a lot of controversy when announced because IE & Windows supported a lot of legacy websites & applications that depended on Flash.
Even in January 2012 they were still determined to do this (again even with developers complaining)
Again in April 2012 they continued with their mission.
Then they came to their senses in June 2012 and opened up Flash access after working with Adobe to optimize it for better CPU/battery use.
However they still didn't have it right.
They forced developers to go through a painful analysis, testing & registration process in order to request permission to have their site added to a special list (the CV whitelist) that granted permission for the site to run flash.
- They required developers to test on hardware that wasn't commercially available
- They ruined the user experience by taking control away from the user.
- The user would visit a site and the content would be blocked - yet they had no way to know nor any way to enable it if they wanted.
- They used a whitelist instead of a blacklist (classic programming flaw when dealing with billions of anything)
Now in March 2013 they finally addressed the fact that this design decision was a bad one and have reverted their settings so that Flash is actually enabled by default.
Everyone wins!
Users will be able to see/use/interact with the content they intended to view and for the few sites that have issues they've been added to a blacklist (instead of a whitelist) so that they can be better controlled.
A lot can happen in a year and a half! Thankfully Microsoft did the right thing in the end - even if they made Web Developers loose countless nights of sleep in the process.
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1 comment:
"There decision" => "Their decision"
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