No Flash support for Metro style Internet Explorer 10

Microsoft's web browser Internet Explorer 10 will be available in a new Metro version, which will not support sites that use Flash plug-ins, according to the company.

"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," said Dean Hachamovitch, corporate vice president, Internet Explorer.

Two versions of Internet Explorer 10 will ship with Windows 8, one an update of the standard browser, and the other a tiled, Metro browser, which will have no plug-in support.

"Many of the 62% 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."

While Safari on iPhone also fails to load Flash content, many browser based games, including those hosted by Facebook, rely on Flash.

Hachamovitch also points to Google's HTML 5 YouTube site, and says plug-in free sites are becoming mainsteam.

"There's a steep drop-off in plug-in usage after Flash, with one control used on 2% of sites and a small collection of controls used on between 0.5% and 0.75% of sites."

Danny Winokur, VP and GM of platform at Adobe Systems responded on the official Adobe Flash blog.

"We expect Flash based apps will come to Metro via Adobe AIR, much the way they are on Android, iOS and BlackBerry Tablet OS today."

"We are working closely with Microsoft, Google, Apple and others in the HTML community to drive innovation in HTML5, to make it as rich as possible for delivering world-class content on the open Web and through App Stores."

New OS Windows 8 is currently in development, with an expected release date of late 2012.