A big, huge, caveat.  This is merely a guess, just like Gruber’s now seemingly incorrect guess on ARM/metro.

I’m an early adapter.  Bleeding edge early.  As Jeremiah Owyang puts it, a swimmer.  I eagerly downloaded the dev preview early, and struggled through installing it on my dev machine (Acer Revo 1600 – which it — eventually — ran quite smoothly on).  I used it, and banged out a quick hello world ‘app’ and generally poked and prodded around, looking what was and wasnt fleshed out, and trying to break it, as one is wont to do with the pre beta releases.  Like everyone else, struggled to find quit and shutdown, and then realized Redmond was putting the mobile spin on metro; no need to quit, just let us do what’s best for you!  So it wasnt until a few hours later that I was surfing the net and ran into the ‘plugin’ issue on the metro IE 10, trying to watch netflix.

After installing silverlight, and finding that not working, going to hulu to watch, and finding flash not working despite my RC Flash 11 install, I assumed it was IE, and possibly someway it identified itself, since everything installed smoothly, it just wasnt identifying itself.  I spent some time binging and googling, foruming, and IRCing, but couldnt seem to find any solutions or explanations.  I downloaded chrome, and was on my merry way, albeit old school, not the seamless (well, not really, but chrome minimal) metro.

I woke up the next morning and read Steven Sinofsky‘s post, fired up the desktop IE, and went off my merry way, until the dev version of chrome (remember, bleeding edge adopter – dev on dev) zonked itself on shockwave.  I pulled up the task manager, expanded it out, and noticed the big red “Suspended” next Internet Explorer.

This. explained. everything.  Perhaps I was distracted when they brought it up during the keynote, but Metro apps and W8 manage things differently.  It’s mobile, on the desktop.  That means suspended apps, modified access, and strict sandboxing rules.  Microsoft has stated, several times,  that it’s the same ‘engine’ running both IE’s.  Probably true.  I suspect that IE may also be behind the scenes in the whole metro interface.  Wouldnt do to have the (now less) unseemly BSOD come up when you’re scrolling through your app list, or to restart the ‘new’ OS just because shockwave was misbehaving on another webpage that’s opened out of view.  Easier to suspend the process.  Easier still to just forego the process. Neatly managing plugins is HARD.  Memory, CPU cycles, disk use, all not under control anymore.  Jobs and his Cupertino gang have sold plenty iDevices without flash.  Microsoft will do the same.

These ungainly justifications 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. 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.  just don’t work and are disingenuous.  Jobs already said it best.  Just link to his famous note.
But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.
The avalanche of media outlets offering their content for Apple’s mobile devices demonstrates that Flash is no longer necessary to watch video or consume any kind of web content. And the 250,000 apps on Apple’s App Store proves that Flash isn’t necessary for tens of thousands of developers to create graphically rich applications, including games.
New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.