If you read the title to this article and said to yourself, “wait a minute, I thought the IE10 Metro browser wasn’t going to support plug-ins,” you’re not imaging things. That’s exactly what everyone thought Microsoft was doing. As it turns out, the reality is a bit more complex. The Disney home page you’re looking at above requires Flash to display rich content, and there it is in the full Metro glory of IE10.
How is this possible? As much as Microsoft is pushing for a web driven by open standards like HTML5, they know that a huge number of sites — including many run by their corporate chums like Disney — still rely on Flash for things like gaming, apps, and DRM-wrapped media streaming. It didn’t really make sense, then, to offer consumers a Metro browser that would break some of the most popular sites on the web. Shipping a totally plug-in free Metro IE10 may have given users additional incentive to check out alternatives like Google Chrome.
There was also a strong push from Adobe, who apparently offered up the Flash source code to Microsoft so that they could work it into the Metro browser somehow. The result? IE10 will ship with an integrated version of Flash Player, much like what Google and Adobe did with Chrome.
The integrated Flash Player was spotted in a pre- Windows 8 Release Preview build. In another interesting twist, it won’t work on just any old website. Instead, it calls on a Microsoft whitelist to see whether or not a given domain is allowed to fire up the integrated Player. Big sites like YouTube, Facebook, Hulu, and CNN will be on the list. It’s safe to assume the list will grow over time, but right now it’s fairly short — and there are some glaring omissions like Armor Games.
What’s not certain yet is whether or not the integrated Flash Player will be included in Windows RT. Adobe has openly said that they’re no longer interested in developing a mobile plug-in, but they might be willing to get their hands dirty one last time for Microsoft. With the Flash source code already in Redmond and support switched on in x86 and x64 Windows 8 builds, would it really make sense to offer up Windows 8 ARM tablets to folks that can’t display Flash-powered websites?
2nd edit:
Also check info concerning update KB3132372 in Dec. 2015 and patch KB3133431 for flash in Jan. 2016. Apparently 3132372 broke alot of things