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As from March 2013, Microsoft allows Adobe Flash content to play by default on its immersive Internet Explorer 10: http://redmondmag.com/articles/2013/03/11/new-ie-10-flash-policy.aspx

When asked about Silverlight, Microsoft says

Silverlight will not be supported in immersive Internet Explorer 10 since these capabilities are superseded by the new WinRT API.

Does this mean that there are capabilities of Adobe Flash not present in the WinRT API that forced Microsoft to allow Flash? What are these capabilities?

Mika
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This decision to support Flash in the touch version of IE10 really had more to do with continuing to allow legacy Flash sites to run during the majority of the Web's transition to HTML5. WinRT API and HTML5/CSS3/JS do contain all of the core capabilities like rich, hardware accelerated animations, audio, and video, and is the superior platform to use, but MS understands that there are some folks who aren't quite there yet, so their older Flash apps still need to be viewable in the meantime.

Short Answer: This decision to allow Flash in IE10 has more to do with backwards compatibility than Flash or Silverlight being a better option than HTML5 or the WinRT platform for apps.

Ryan Hayes
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    +1. Legacy *Silverlight* sites, of course, get no consideration at all. – MarkJ May 10 '13 at 16:22
  • Also HTML5 is not ready yet consistently whereas Flash is mature. – Den May 10 '13 at 16:43
  • If this is for backward compatibility, why isn't Microsoft own Silverlight allowed? – Mika May 11 '13 at 11:50
  • There are obviously other factors that go into it, but if you think about the amount of Flash on the web vs Silverlight on the web, it's a pretty massive gap. I don't work for Microsoft, and wasn't in the conversations, but install base is definitely a factor. Also, this is just in the touch mode of the browser. If you have to have Silverlight support, you can always drop back to desktop mode, which still has all the touch support enabled, it just doesn't have all the touch-centric chrome, at least in the Pro version (don't have an RT device to double check myself for that version, though). – Ryan Hayes May 11 '13 at 14:29