It is never a bad sight to see companies (particularly large ones) listening to user feedback and adjusting accordingly. And this new resurgent Redmond is lightening quick to adjust.
During the development of its latest operating system Microsoft announced that it was working closely with Adobe to put in Flash support for Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 8 and RT without the need to install an external plug-in.
However the feature did not run by default and Microsoft set up a special IE10 Compatibility View list of websites that it thought were not just safe, but could run well on the browser on Windows 8 and RT.
Starting Tuesday, all this is set to change, and Flash will be enabled by default. Microsoft shared the news in a post on the IE blog:
“Of the thousands of domains tested for Flash compatibility to date, we have found fewer than 4% are still incompatible, in the most part because the core site experience requires other ActiveX controls in addition to Flash. With Windows 8 in the hands of customers and developers, we listened to feedback around the experience of Web sites with Flash.”
This change came about after the reasoning that an overwhelming majority of websites played along nicely with IE10 on the company’s newest platform.
The desktop version of Internet Explorer 10 has always been compatible with any and all Flash websites. And now the Windows RT version of the browser looks set to do the same — unless it comes across a website that violates Microsoft’s Compatibility View list.
And this is something that makes total sense.
Instead of blocking all websites and enabling only a select few, do things the other way round and block the ones that are proven to be problematic.
If anything, this could finally boost some Windows RT tablet sales as it would make those tablet the absolutely perfect mobile way to consume Flash content on the Internet.