Jairo [CC-BY-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Starting with an update due out today, Flash will be much more broadly accessible from Internet Explorer in both Windows 8 and Windows RT — the version of Windows that runs on ARM processors.

When Windows 8 and Windows RT debuted, Microsoft took a cautious approach, allowing full Flash only in the desktop version of Internet Explorer 10, and only for Windows 8, not Windows RT. Flash was allowed in the new-style Windows 8 browser, but only for a limited number of sites white-listed by Microsoft as proving they were both highly used and not buggy.

With the change, Flash content will run by default in all versions of the browser on both operating systems, though some sites that don’t work with touch or have other incompatibilities will be blocked.

In a blog post on Monday, Microsoft attributed the change to the work Adobe had done to improve Flash, and the fact that a growing number of Flash-enabled sites work well on Windows 8, both in terms of performance and battery life.

It’s the latest change of heart for Microsoft, which initially was going to keep Flash out of the new-style browser entirely. (Technically, it only said that the new-style IE would be plugin free, which remains true. When it added Flash support, it did so by building it into the browser, rather than as a plugin. However, Microsoft clearly implied no Flash support, so we’re counting that as another flip-flop.)

It’s understandable that Microsoft would be of mixed mind when it comes to how and when to support Flash in Windows, particularly in Windows RT, which is designed to eliminate a lot of the old Windows legacy and runs on mobile-centric ARM processors.

On one hand, much of the Web still runs on the Adobe plugin, and maintaining support offers both a ton of compatibility and a way to stand out from Apple’s iOS, which offers essentially no Flash support. And there’s no question that Windows 8 could use some additional selling points, as machines haven’t exactly been flying off the shelves.

On the other hand, Flash is often the culprit for crashes, and can be a big battery drain. And performance on mobile devices has also left a lot to be desired.

Microsoft isn’t the first to run into this issue. For some time there was a version of Flash for Android, but it never worked all that well, and Adobe scrapped the effort in 2011.

(Image courtesy of Jairo [CC-BY-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons)

Sergey Nivens / Shutterstock.com

But that’s not to say that Apple hasn’t been preparing — quietly as always — for the kind of eventualities that tend to crop up when hackers and other digital miscreants are taken to probing your systems for vulnerabilities.

One visible sign of that preparation can be detected in the personnel that Apple has been hiring in the area of software and system security in recent years. Apple rarely if ever comments on any but its most senior hires. Nevertheless, several names have come to light. And while Apple generally doesn’t comment to confirm or deny the role that any of these people may or may not be playing in response to the latest incident, here are some people whose job at Apple involves security.

Craig Federighi: Senior vice president for software engineering, Federighi is in charge of all aspects of Apple’s operating system software, both on the Mac and the iOS platforms, and reports directly to CEO Tim Cook. He inherited responsibility for iOS after last year’s departure of Scott Forstal. He worked at Next Computer, the company Apple acquired in 1996 that brought Steve Jobs back to Apple after more than a decade. Later, Federighi spent a decade at Ariba, including a stint as its CTO. Everyone involved in OS security, whether for the iPhone, iPad or the Mac, reports to him.

David Rice: Hired in 2011 as Apple’s global director of security, Rice is a graduate of the U.S. Naval War College and spent time at the National Security Agency. However, he’s best known for his 2007 book “Geekonomics,” in which he argued that software is a new kind of public infrastructure that when built badly amounts to a public hazard, and those who buy it become virtual crash test dummies who have to suffer with a software industry that is unaccountable for the results.

Window Snyder: Hired in 2010, Snyder lists her title as Senior Product Manager, Security and Privacy. She had previously headed up security operations at Mozilla, the open source software organization responsible for the Firefox Web browser. She has also held software security positions at Microsoft and @stake, a security firm that’s now part of Symantec. She’s listed as co-author, with Frank Swiderski, of a Microsoft-produced book called “Threat Modeling,” which focuses on looking at computer security from the point of view of an attacker.

Ivan Krstić: Hired in 2009, the Croatian-born Krstić is in charge of core OS security on the Mac. He previously ran security for the One Laptop Per Child program, where he came up with a method to secure programs in Linux called BitFrost that wrapped individual programs in their own virtual operating environments so that one couldn’t harm the other. The approach was considered so novel that some suggested incorporating it as a core feature of Linux.

Kristin Paget: Currently a Core OS Security Researcher, Paget is a Microsoft veteran who’s generally credited with “saving Windows Vista” by forcing a delay in that operating system’s release after demonstrating that it wasn’t as secure as previously thought, Paget joined Apple late last year as a Core OS security researcher. Her hiring was first reported by Wired.

Image: Sergey Nivens / Shutterstock.com

I’m interested in the new Microsoft Surface, but am confused about Windows 8. Some things I read say it can run my current Windows apps, like Outlook and Quicken and iTunes. Others say no. Which is it

A:

Both. There are two fundamental branches of Windows 8: The full version and a more limited version called Windows RT, which is what the Surface and some other new computers use. On the full version, you can run all the apps you mentioned, plus new-style, tablet type apps.

But, on RT — and therefore on the Surface — you can only run the new-style apps, plus a handful of Microsoft’s own traditional Windows apps that are included: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and Internet Explorer. You can’t run any other traditional Windows apps.

Q:

Does Windows 8 support Adobe Flash on Web pages?

A:

Yes, but it depends on which of the two computing environments in Windows 8 you’re using. In the familiar desktop, the old-style version of Internet Explorer should run Flash the way it did in the past. In the new tablet-style Start screen, a new touch-optimized version of IE will only support Flash on selected Web pages where Microsoft has decided the experience is good. If Flash doesn’t work on the tablet-type IE, you can switch to the old style version of the browser.

Q:

I own an iPhone 3G, an iPad 2, an older iMac and a MacBook. All are great devices but I like the looks of the new Windows Phone and Windows 8 PCs. Are there tools available that would make it easy to use all of these things together and also make it possible to play my iTunes?

A:

Google and Microsoft make it easiest to remain within their own families of products and services, but mixed use is certainly possible. For instance, there’s a Windows version of iTunes that should run on Intel-powered Windows 8 PCs. And Microsoft makes an app called Windows Phone Connector for Mac that allows a Windows Phone to sync with iTunes and iPhoto on a Mac. I’ve used it and it works well. More information is at: http://bit.ly/VArueS.

Write to Walt at walt.mossberg@wsj.com.

There are seven billion people in this world and only 1.2 billion computers — but close to six billion cellphones. That makes the commercialization ability and growth potential for the mobile Internet massively greater than that of the PC-based Internet. China, the world’s biggest Internet market, recently surpassed the U.S. in smartphone activation, and the mobile browser is once again coming to the forefront. Here’s why.

In emerging markets such as China and India, the world’s two most populous countries, the mobile browser is a critical channel that connects people to the Internet in ways that the PC browser never did. For many people, it is their only connection point to the Internet — take Indonesia, for example, where linking its thousands of islands by a fixed nationwide network was prohibitively expensive, so they prioritized the build-out of a mobile network.

Since cellphones are much cheaper than computers, and the mobile Internet is much more accessible than fixed-line Internet in emerging markets, users purchase their first cellphones much earlier than their first computers, which sets user habits to surf the Web through cellphones.

In fact, Internet traffic flow on mobile devices surpassed that of the PC in India in May of this year, and the number of mobile Internet users overtook that of the PC in China just a month later.

The graph above is slide 18 from Mary Meeker’s 2012 Internet Trends presentation

In addition to user habit, technological advancement has contributed to the widespread use of the mobile Internet. For example, cloud computing has made mobile browsing work where bandwidth and mobile devices’ computing power are lacking. Before, in many parts of the world, browsing the Web through a cellphone with its native browser was extremely inconvenient and slow. Opening a Web page took almost a minute — intolerable to most users, particularly those accustomed to surfing on a PC. It was also ridiculously expensive. For example, opening a 2MB Web page in China (the typical size of a homepage for popular Chinese Internet portals), would cost 60 RMB, or almost $10. With cloud computing, data can be compressed by 80 percent or more, offering much faster and affordable Web surfing.

With the bandwidth issue easing and mobile devices becoming more capable, the cloud computing technology approach makes mobile browsing accessible to a much larger worldwide population, and gives users an overall improved mobile Internet experience.

Mobile Apps vs. the Browser

People in the industry have made sweeping generalizations like “The Web is dead.” Yes, apps are important, but they will never replace browsers. Internet surfing has gone has through three stages: the first was browser-centered (Netscape), the second was client app-centered (Apple). With Web surfing on cellphones, particularly in emerging countries, the third stage is back to being browser-centered. Here’s why:

• Security. This is a serious issue on cellphones. Installing an app means opening up a myriad of ports, which is like punching holes in a wall. Cellphones are closely connected to a user’s identity and financial information, which attracts thieves. The browser has been created with a high level of security; the browser sandboxes the Web apps running on it, hence providing an extra level of security over apps.
• Service. What users really want is the functionality that an app provides — not the app itself. With the Internet browser becoming more capable, Flash-based games can run on a browser, as can videos. For a long time, people used dedicated video software, but with YouTube, people have become accustomed to watching videos on a browser — and may not need a video player at all. The apps are still there, of course, but they’re morphing into Web apps.
• Standardization. Today we need to develop for different platforms like Android, iOS and Symbian. This takes a tremendous amount of resources from developers, and users are reluctant and annoyed with having to update their apps all the time. But for a Web app, it’s “develop once, run on multiple platforms.”

What’s Next for the Browser

By nature, the browser is a user’s access point to the Internet. Software companies such as Netscape and Microsoft went against nature by developing products as isolated pieces of software. Both Apple and Google are innovation leaders in the Internet industry, and serve as great examples for newcomers. The lesson learned from Netscape and Microsoft is that we should not view the browser simply as a single software tool; instead, it should be treated as an Internet service platform. Google knows this with its platform, and tries to fulfill the needs of vastly different users by enabling them to customize their browsers with plugins and Web apps.

Users turn to the browser for three reasons: Information gathering, entertainment and daily life enhancement. The capabilities browser companies provide must match those service areas, like personalized navigation. Smart technologies can now adjust picture and text size, provide voice control, offer different reading modes or change delivery priorities based on the network environment.

Browser companies gain customers and market share with industry-leading performance, but that is far from enough to build a service platform. To build a global ecosystem of users, there also needs to be a strong business-building component, like account management and billing services, or platforms developed specifically for game use. Dedicated operations teams need to conduct research in market dynamics and actively monitor user feedback to drive timely updates that satisfy the ever-changing needs of users.

Only by focusing on the diverse needs of users wherever they reside can we fully realize the value of the Internet browser. The time is now for the tech industry to take more of a global view of what that means.

Yongfu Yu is the chairman and CEO of UCWeb, whose mission is to provide a better mobile Internet experience to billions of users around the world. Earlier in his career, he was a VP at Legend Capital. Yu graduated from Nankai University in 1999 with a bachelor’s degree in economics and minor in computer science.

But, contrary to popular opinion, Goko argues that it is possible — and has games to prove it.

The reason why the subject is worth debating at all is because HTML5 offers one major advantage over other technologies, like Flash: It allows developers to create one version of a game that can run across multiple platforms, including Facebook, the Web and mobile.

Not only does that save developers money, it also lets consumers play the same version of the game on whatever device they choose.

As a demonstration of its platform’s capabilities, Goko is releasing Dominion — a real-world card game with a huge following — across multiple digital platforms.

It goes live today on Facebook, Google+, Goko.com, Android and iOS.

Goko is also launching a few games exclusively on its own Web site, including Catan World, based on the popular board game, Settlers of Catan; Forbidden City, a tile-placing digital game; War Factory, a puzzle and war strategy mashup; and All the King’s Men, a tower defense game.

The problems with HTML5 have been well documented. For example, in June, Wooga, a social game developer in Germany, said it was no longer developing games in HTML5, after encountering a number of problems, including long load times, lack of sound and reliance on Internet connection.

Ted Griggs, Goko’s CEO, acknowledges that there are some limitations to the technology, but for most card and board games, it’s good enough today.

To prove that its platform is up to the task, Goko secured licensing deals with 150 well-known board and card games.

Starting today, the company’s platform will also be available to developers looking for help creating, distributing and monetizing games across multiple platforms.

As part of the launch, the company is announcing that it has raised $8 million in a first round of founding from Redpoint Ventures and Alsop Louie Partners.

Previously, Griggs and Goko’s other founder, Kevin Binkley, started Electric Gravity, which was acquired by Microsoft and renamed MSN Gaming Zone. Other members of the team are from OpenFeint (now Gree), Digital Chocolate, Playdom and Zynga.

Early this morning, Adobe dropped the Flash Player browser plugin from the Google Play store.

While pre-Jelly Bean versions of Android can continue to run Flash if it’s installed, and Jelly Bean devices can install it via workaround, Adobe recommends against doing so, as it doesn’t plan to offer security updates and bug fixes for existing versions of Flash for Android after September 2013, and attempting to run the plugin on Jelly Bean may result in “unpredictable behavior.”

The removal of Flash from Google Play comes as Adobe refocuses its mobile video efforts around HTML5, something the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs suggested it do years ago.

“New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too),” Jobs wrote in April of 2010 as the two companies battled over Web video standards, with Apple refusing to support Flash on its iOS devices. “Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.”

Great idea, Steve!

The company won’t just be partying for Woz, but celebrating an important technology advance. And while the press release it has put out doesn’t exactly make it accessible to the layman, it comes down to this: Servers that run in the cloud are going all flash.

Up to now, more often than not you’d see flash memory added as a supplement to a standard server to speed things up. The example I always use is pretty straightforward: The main microprocessors in a server that are doing the heavy computing lifting of processing data are constantly — and by constantly I mean a few million times a second — waiting around for the rest of the system to catch up and hand off more data to it. Conventional hard drives and all the pipes in the system that connect them to the processor are too slow to keep the processor running at full capacity, and so having spent the money for all that computing horsepower, you never quite get all the potential out it. Multiply this condition across thousands of servers in a data center, each with several processors in the box, and you can see how this becomes an irritating economic problem.

Fusion-io’s stock in trade has from the start been about keeping those impatient processors busy. You put flash memory chips up close to the processor, let them grab a lot of data out of the hard drive and stuff their pockets full of it and then shovel it off by the armload to the processor. More computing work gets done, and in the long run, you get more computing oomph for your dollar, or spend less on computing hardware to get the same level of work done. Got all that?

It’s because of this that companies like Facebook and Apple have loaded the servers in their data centers with Fusion-io’s memory cards. But the flash has always existed in a combined environment. Facebook, for example, treated the flash as a cache, pretty much as I described it above.

But now, using this new technology that Fusion is announcing tonight, the boxes in Facebook’s data centers are going all flash. As David Flynn, Fusion’s CEO, put it to me last week when he came to New York: “Most recently, because flash has become higher capacity and has a lower cost point, Facebook has gone to an all-flash architecture. The systems are all flash and no longer blended with hard disks.”

Typically, data centers have these big hulking storage arrays that store all the live data that’s being used, and they perform essentially the same function that the hard drive does in your PC: They hold everything, waiting for the moment when they’re called upon to be used. Yes, I’m simplifying it greatly.

You should also know that storage arrays are what companies like EMC and NetApp specialize in, and they’re generally still based on hard drives. Start-ups like XtremIO — which EMC bought — and Violin Memory are working on ways to use flash to blow up the old-school storage array business, but it hasn’t happened yet.

Today’s new product is Fusion’s play to deal its own blow to the established business for storage arrays. It’s called the ION Data Accelerator, and it’s software that the company says can transform any industry standard server into a wicked-fast “data acceleration device.”

What does that mean? Well, Fusion says a media company deployed the Data Accelerator technology on its servers and saw a 25x improvement in the performance of its SQL database, and media transcoding — a pretty data-intensive process if ever there was one — improved 8x. A dozen early customers are putting it through its paces, and yes, naturally, Facebook is one of them.

If you want to try it, you can do so in one of two ways: You can get a server with Fusion’s ioMemory added to it from one of the company’s partners, including Hewlett-Packard, Dell or IBM, and buy the accelerator software directly. Fusion will provide you with the service and support you need to get it up and running. The other way to get it is to deal with a value-added reseller who can add it and integrate it into a white box server. Basically, the technology will be pretty accessible and not just available to the big data center companies.

It also marks a potentially big step in the evolution of the use of flash in the data center generally. As Flynn put it: “We first came out to the world saying that flash belonged in the server.” As fundamental shifts go, that was a pretty big shift by itself. “Now we’re saying that the server itself can, with flash in it, replace your storage array.”

It’s the second bit of news this week from Fusion-io. Earlier this week it said, without elaborating, that it is teaming up with storage concern NetApp. And, next week, it will report quarterly earnings. Fusion has had a pretty busy time since its IPO last year.

The decision is yet another blow to the social network, which is struggling to find a way to monetize its mobile application as more people access Facebook from their phones.

As the fourth-largest game developer on the social network, Wooga was chosen to be one of the first partners to develop a game using HTML5, which would enable users to play games on Facebook through either a browser or a mobile device. However, the company has told AllThingsD that it is planning to announce today that the experiment has been largely unsuccessful, and that it will no longer make games in HTML5.

Clarification: To be clear, Wooga still remains a close partner of Facebook’s and will continue to distribute other mobile games through the social network — just not ones using HTML5.

Instead, the game developer will be focusing its resources on building native games for Apple’s iOS, which demonstrates the strength of that platform for discoverability.

“Given the excitement around the technology, the buzz in the media, the buzz among engineers you’d bump into at conferences, it would have been absurd not to at least test the technology,” said Philipp Moeser, Wooga’s co-founder and CTO, in a blog post.

Over the past few months, Wooga assigned as many as 10 employees to the game, but there were still too many issues remaining. “The mobile app market is a billion-dollar business that HTML5 could significantly disrupt. It has the potential to be a complete game changer, but the technology is not there yet,” Moeser added.

Despite several efforts to promote its game, Wooga said very few players ever discovered it.

After Wooga launched Magic Land Island in October, it was played a total of 1.3 million times and experienced a retention rate of only 5 percent. For comparison, Wooga said that Diamond Dash, on Apple’s iOS, was downloaded more than 18 million times, and had a 50 percent retention rate during the same time period.

As one of the biggest game developers on Facebook, Wooga will also continue to develop Facebook games for the PC, which are typically developed using Adobe’s Flash technology. It will also use Facebook Connect in its mobile games on iOS. As part of the announcement, Wooga said it will rename the game Pocket Island, and will make the code available to the open-source community to continue development work on HTML5, which is still in its early stages.

Wooga said it had encountered a number of problems with the technology, including long initial load times, lack of sound and reliance on Internet connection. Additionally, when the game first launched, there was no icon for it, so once players left Facebook they were often confused as to how to get back in and play.

Wooga also made the decision recently to remove at least three of its games from the Google+ platform, after not gaining enough users to justify it.