Windows 8 Download

[TheAnimus]

There's no flash at all when using IE in the metro shell - by design. IE for the 'desktop' still supports it (although you may be right about 64bit support as I didn't try this).

Indeed, I still have mixed feelings about this thou, but right now, regular 'desktop' IE took a bit of effort to get flash 11 to work with.

Heck I normally browse with no script, or at the very least flashblock/click to flash. But I'm a power user, I know that "hmm its probably lack of flash" and flick over. My mum dosen't.

My question is what about all those grown up things active-x helps with? Sure it's an attack vector, but ultimately everything on the PC is.

Nice thing thou, because this is windows, they won't ban other browsers.

[dangel]

I think the driver is obvious - tablets. They're thinking about the low power sandboxed experience just like Apple did. Personally, I prefer the android approach of load-on-demand but i'm no massive fan of flash anyway (it rarely does anything of value for me).

You're right though - they'll be choice (just like Android) and so i'd hope Opera might take a look at the platform for metro as well as their current desktop. I suppose you can still switch to Opera on the desktop and use it via touch anyway - just a question of whether they'll do an ARM build (although I'm not convinced ARM will be relevant for that long given AMD and Intel's designs on the low power mobile market).

[TheAnimus]

The other issue, is one of battery life, adverts, animated gifs and the like can often go in to frame buffers, flash animations tend to be more complex, and thus drain battery.

The user experience trade off is obvious, worse advertising for better battery. Who would choose a better banner advert over an extra few % of battery life!?

[TheAnimus]

quite a good comment thou:
"Browsing without plug-ins, Microsoft says! I wonder, now. That is of course because plug-ins for Internet Explorer are impediments instead of bless. However, if you must look at the competition, add-ons in Mozilla Firefox are one of the primary sources of its popularity.

Microsoft should take plug-ins more seriously. A lot more seriously..."

That is very true, whilst MS have some very useful plugins, but when you look at a users PC, for every flash/pdf reader, you've got a the HP web assist printer, or Skype, why the devils fornication does skype need to parse every element of the DOM to try and find a phone number?!

MS need to make it obvious that when your installing that it goes outside of the sandbox, and what it interferes with. That is possible for every install that adds a CLSID to another component. But we'd need some cryptographic security in the way COM works, which of course we don't have....

[scaryjim]

Click-to-load flash is great in most situations, but you still need an option somewhere for always on plug-in, in case someone writes a website that's javascripted to not even show the flash components unless it detects flash player available and functioning in your browser. Yes 4OD, I'm looking at you! I still haven't worked out why it wants to deny you the option of loading the flash video by other means (e.g. skyfire's recoding service)... I'm sure there's some "good" reason, but I haven't worked it out yet. The sooner we all get onto HTML5 <video> the better, IMNSHO

[TheAnimus]

Well the thing is you can instantly tap the view in desktop browser and get all your plugins. Its a smooth process.

I just had a couple of issues with the flash 11 player in 64bit, they seem fixed now thou.

[Ubique]

I am giving this a download now. Thanks OP for posting this!

[fazz]

can i dual boot this?

[badass]

can i dual boot this?

I wouldn't risk it. It's not even beta yet. I'm running it in a VMware workstation 8 VM but it seems that Virtualbox runs it fine too. You'll need 4GB RAM ideally in your machine to virtualise it though

[djnaff]

I duel booted ok you even get a new colorful boot loader
The developer version I have is still full of bugs.
Hopefully the final version will have the option of classic mode as the new start menu is a bit of a pain on keyboard mouse.

[Blu3m00nMCFC]

Might give this a try.

[watercooled]

Has anyone else noticed an NDA notice pop up on the preview?

[Tim_UK1]

been running this for a week as the only operating system on my wife's pc - no major problems at all - some of the apps - certainly the facebook one doesn't work - but has been very stable ans appears very fast despite being on a modest pc.

this was installed (32bit version) as a clean install - hardly needed any additonal drivers to get it running.

It expires around march time next year.