Web Browsers in Win 8

Question

MS has stated that IE10 in Metro won't allow plug-ins to load. You can use regular IE10 in desktop mode to get the plug-ins to work. Fine. I'm wondering how other web browsers will handle this. I'm sure Google and Mozilla will want to develop browsers for Windows 8 and it wouldn't be that hard to get full screen done on Metro since they already have this functionality. But will they allow plug-ins to be used in their Metro style web browsers? This would certainly be a competitive advantage for these web browsers over IE10.

Answer 1

Plugins are probably an issue now in Windows8DP because all the apps run in a sandboxed mode. The proper release of Windows8 might support plugins for IE & other browsers.You'll have to wait and see.

Regards,

Dylan Meeus

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0x2B |~ 0x2B Blog : www.it-ca.net/blogdylan

Answer 2

Of course MS could change its mind, but they seemed pretty clear in that they are going for a plug-in free experience in IE10 for Metro.

I'm referring to this blog post: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/09/14/metro-style-browsing-and-plug-in-free-html5.aspx

Answer 3

What kind of plugins do you actually lack?

 

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0x2B |~ 0x2B Blog : www.it-ca.net/blogdylan

Answer 4

Well as of right now I have the following plug-ins in FireFox (not to be confused with add-ons):

Java
Quicktime
LogMeIn
Silverlight
Flash
FoxIt Reader for PDFs
Office 2010 plug-ins to open, view, and edit office documents within the web browser

I'm not sure that these will be available in the Metro version of IE10. Perhaps you could come up with alternatives to Quicktime videos by going with HTML5 video formats, but that doesn't mean websites will continue to have quicktime videos out there. And if you were to get rid of PDF and/or Office 2010 plug-ins, it would require you to open up separate applications when sometimes you don't need to do that if all you want to do is view the document and/or print it and then go back to the previous page.

Java and Flash are self-explanatory. Perhaps the two most popular plug-ins out there. And LogMeIn would be pretty cool on a tablet without having to go back into the desktop mode.