With both Silverlight and Flex gone, the roadmap for future projects is clear: It will be HTML5. Unfortunately, what is not clear is which HTML5 runtime. In many ways, Safari enjoys the greatest reach - runs on Apples and Windows. Presumably Windows 8 will lock out Safari, which means we still have to support Safari and IE10. And we still haven't figured out where Android browsers fit in.
Perhaps Adobe's tool will be able to account for browser quirks better than humans can. We can all hope.
In Metro, IE is tied in pretty well, and currently there aren't any other browsers that work in Metro. On tablets (only Metro), the browser would have to be compiled to run on ARM processors (assumedly), so the barrier to entry is perhaps higher than now.
I think that it's likely there will be alternative browsers (assuming MS doesn't lock them out), but it may well be a similar situation to the iPad, where these browsers are really just a skinned UIWebView, rather than a different rendering engine.
IE was always tied to Windows, but that never prevented other browsers from running.
On tablets (only Metro), the browser would have to be compiled to run on ARM processors (assumedly), so the barrier to entry is perhaps higher than now.
Sure, but that's hardly locking browsers out, and besides Mobile Safari already runs on ARM (as does Firefox).
I think that it's likely there will be alternative browsers (assuming MS doesn't lock them out), but it may well be a similar situation to the iPad, where these browsers are really just a skinned UIWebView, rather than a different rendering engine.
But why? Just because Apple locks other browsers, MS will too? I don't get why you assume that.
Perhaps Adobe's tool will be able to account for browser quirks better than humans can. We can all hope.