Flash will now run by default on IE 10 unless the domain hosting the file has been found by Microsoft to be incompatible with their touch devices. However, in a surprising move, this week Microsoft have flipped this policy on its head, producing instead, a new blacklist. Whilst they claimed the policy was to restrict sites that weren’t touch-ready, many suspected the policy was related to security holes that have plagued the Flash plugin for years. swf files to be very much a niche technology from the iPhone onwards.įollowing Flash’s downward spiral, Microsoft - whose relationship with Flash had always tumultuous to say the least - enacted a policy that required sites to be whitelisted in order to run on Windows 8 and RT. It’s no real surprise that browser manufacturers want to reduce the number of technologies they support.Īdobe’s once-flagship product Flash has been slammed in recent years, particularly by Apple, and whilst it was always unlikely that it would shuffle off this mortal coil altogether, most commentators expected. Not only do they have to support developing standards, but they need to support as many existing sites as possible - even when those sites are still using (for which there has never been any excuse). Browser manufacturers have to cater for all the sites out there. That’s not the end of the story though, because new sites make up a tiny fraction of the internet.

In fact, if you’re using HTML, CSS and JavaScript correctly, there’s no reason that sites shouldn’t be equally accessible in everything from the latest nightly-build of Firefox to an ancient text browser like Lynx. When we’re building sites, we can ensure that we provide support for even obsolete browsers. Most backwards compatibility is achieved by web designers with careful application of graceful degradation - the process by which advanced features are able to fail silently, without compromising content. There’s a concept in web design that is more important than responsive design, more important than mobile-first, more important than separating style and content the most important concept in web design is backwards compatibility.

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