Internet Explorer 10 will have two versions: the full-blown desktop app with plug-in and extension support, and the plug-in free Metro app.
Microsoft's Steven Sinofsky said in a blog on Wednesday that there will be two versions of Internet Explorer 10: a full-blown desktop app that will support extensions and plug-ins including Flash, and a Metro-style app that will be completely plug-in free, relying on HTML5. That means it will not support Adobe's"legacy" technology by default.
"For the web to move forward and for consumers to get the most out of touch-first browsing, the Metro style browser in Windows 8 is as HTML5-only as possible, and plug-in free," added IE team leader Dean Hachamovitch. "The experience that plug-ins provide today is not a good match with Metro style browsing and the modern HTML5 web."
According to Hachamovitch, running the Metro version without plug-ins will mean an improved battery life, better security, reliability and privacy for users. And now that the Internet has advanced to sustaining an HTML5 environment, supporting legacy plug-in technologies would simply detract from the consumer experience. In fact. plug-in free HTML5-based mobile sites are becoming more common -- just look at Google's Music Beta and the mobile sites for Twitter and Facebook.
"We examined the use of plug-ins across the top 97,000 sites world-wide, a corpus which includes local sites outside the US in significant depth," Hachamovitch said. "Many of the 62-percent of these sites that currently use Adobe Flash already fall back to HTML5 video in the absence of plug-in support. When serving ads in the absence of plug-ins, most sites already perform the equivalent of this fallback, showing that this approach is practical and scalable. There’s a steep drop-off in plug-in usage after Flash, with one control used on 2-percent of sites and a small collection of controls used on between 0.5-percent and 0.75-percent of sites."
Yet given that the Metro version of Internet Explorer 10 will be pushed as a "plug-in free experience," it will still support old-school consumer sites and "line of business" applications that require legacy ActiveX controls. Users simply tap "Use Desktop View" in Metro style IE to access these sites in their entirety. "For what these sites do, the power of HTML5 makes more sense, especially in Windows 8 apps," he added.
To see how Internet Explorer 10 will adjust its behavior site by site, head here.
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