IE9 on Windows Phone 7 is nearly there, but still lacks Flash

The Windows Phone Mango update from Microsoft might just have its shipping date revealed sometime this week, as it is already “code complete” according to Joe Marini, Principal Program Manager for IE on Windows Phone, and they are “now debugging, we (they) are performance tuning. Graphics performance is a big focus for us (them) right now. That, rendering compatibility, markup compatibility – any rendering issues are really getting looked at closely right now.”

One of the major improvements in Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) would be hardware accelerated browsing that includes video, audio, text, canvas, drawing and general rendering. To get an idea on how much further it has improved since it was shown off earlier this year, the 23 fps is now 27 fps – that is nearly a 30% improvement there when you look at it statistically.

The lack of Flash might prove to be a drawback for some folks who are so used to having Flash around their Internet and Web life, that they cannot envision it any other way. What do you think – is Flash support in a browser absolutely essential?