HTML5 design and developer tools also remain weak, though this situation is improving with the creation of products like Adobe Edge. Flash developers will have to wait to see what tools Adobe delivers.
Silverlight developers, at least, will have an easy migration path available to them: the new Metro development environment, used for producing native Metro applications, borrows heavily from Silverlight, and making the switch from an in-browser plugin-based application to a standalone Metro application should be relatively easier. The result is that in the desire to push an open, plugin-free Web, companies are being forced to migrate away from the Web entirely. The solution to this conundrum on the iOS platform has been the app: companies like Netflix and the BBC have applications to watch video on these devices. The switch to the desktop browser also appears to discard things like back button history and current page state. The desktop browser isn't designed for touch inputs, meaning that users will either have to switch to a mouse and keyboard, or fumble around with an interface that wasn't built for fingers.
But the experience will be substantially inferior. Technically, there's nothing wrong with the desktop browser, of course the rendering engine and performance will be identical between both Metro and desktop. With Windows 8, however, those reasonable decisions to use Flash or Silverlight will now be heavily penalized. However, until now, Microsoft's messaging has been tempered somewhat: use HTML5 when you can, but if you can't-if you need support for DRM-protected media streaming, for example-then it's reasonable to switch to an alternative, plugin-based technology. HTML5 potentially has reach far beyond that of Flash, since it can target both conventional browsers and closed ecosystems (such as iOS) alike. Microsoft has been vigorously promoting HTML5 for the last year and a half as the best way of providing rich interactivity on the Web.
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