Microsoft has announced that some versions of its new operating system, Windows 8, will not include support for Flash when it launches next year. Specifically, tablets running the 'Metro' user interface will be "...as HTML5-only as possible, and plug-in free" said the company. 

Writing about the the change of strategy in a blog post, Microsoft's head of IE development, Dean Hachamovitch, said that:

"Running Metro style IE plug-in free improves battery life as well as security, reliability, and privacy for consumers. Plug-ins were important early on in the web's history. But the web has come a long way since then with HTML5. Providing compatibility with legacy plug-in technologies would detract from, rather than improve, the consumer experience of browsing in the Metro style UI." 

Many sites were already moving to a plug-in free experience, he continued, including Google's HTML5 YouTube site for phones:

"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. 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. 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.

Plug-in free browsers today already deliver great experiences with well-authored HTML5 content. These experiences get even better with touch in Metro style IE."