While Apple seems to be gaining some mileage in its campaign to purge Flash from the net, Microsoft appears to be going the other way. For a while we had been expecting Redmond to copy Apple and move to HTML5 and walk away from Flash.

However IE 10 has proved that Microsoft still loves the Systems browser plug-in despite claiming a two years ago that browser plug-ins are a relic from the Internet's early days. At the time it said that it would ban them when IE10 was running with Windows 8's Metro user interface. However it didn’t and built in Adobe's plug-in directly into IE10.

Writing in the company blog Rob Mauceri, program manager of Microsoft's Internet Explorer group, said that Redmond has enabled Flash by default on both Windows 8 and Windows RT. Microsoft uses a blacklist to block Flash in the small number of sites that are still incompatible Microsoft for touch or that depend on other plug-ins.

Mauceri apparently sees Windows' Flash support now as a useful part of Microsoft’s cunning plan to spread Windows beyond PCs to tablets. While Flash is effectively dead for Android and iOS tablets, but Microsoft sees a role for it. He said IE10 with Flash on Windows 8 enables people to see more of the Web working with high quality, especially compared with the experience in other touch-first or tablet browsers and devices.

Adobe has done a lot of work to improve Flash and has been working closely with Microsoft so that it worked with Windows 8.