Flash Player is the most ubiquitous Platform available

In the past, I’ve voiced that the non-pervasiveness of Flash (rather an average user’s ability to install plug-ins) is one reason website designers should consider before going for Flash. I officially scrap that as a point no longer valid.

Millward Brown, one of the world’s leading market research agencies, recently closed a survey commissioned by Adobe Systems, Inc. with a goal “to track and compare Plug-In technology used to view content on the web.” This study, conducted quarterly, placed Adobe Flash Player at a comfortable 99% as the most pervasive software platform. Java (85%), Microsoft Windows Media Player (79.3%), Apple QuickTime Player (65.5%) and Adobe Shockwave Player (59.2%) round up the top five. The maximum margin of error was reportedly +/-6%.

Pervasiveness, or penetration, is defined based on the presence of a platform on Internet-enabled desktops in mature markets (US, UK, Canada, France, Germany and Japan). The study has results from countries like mainland China, South Korea, Russia, India, and Taiwan as well. However, nothing explicit was mentioned about Philippines, Brazil and Romania which according to my latest trend check are among the top 9 regions searching for RIA technologies.

To me, the biggest surprise is the high position of QuickTime. Can anybody explain it?

Visit the methodology page for in-depth details about the study, and the version penetration page for statistics by version.

SWF now supports SEO !

Adobe has provided Flash Player technology to Google and Yahoo! that allows their search spiders to navigate through a live SWF application as if they were virtual users.

Adobe is working with Google and Yahoo! to enable one of the largest fundamental improvements in web search results by making the Flash file format (SWF) a first-class citizen in searchable web content. This will increase the accuracy of web search results by enabling top search engines to understand what's inside of RIAs and other rich web content created with Adobe Flash technology and add that relevance back to the HTML page.

Check it out...
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/swf_searchability.html

Flash Player : Mac Player FileUpload Complete event not thrown

I have been raving a long time about the missing Complete event in Mac players, it appears that it is caused by a zero-length response is returned to the client.

Its been there a very long time as I remember having troubles with it during the Flex 1.5 days developing for the Macromedia Central runtime.

A quick and dirty hack on the server is to write something (can be anything) back into the response stream. Clients will ignore the payload and only look for the HTTP status header but the Complete event will be thrown on all players... :-)

is it not an option to modify the servercode, you can make up for the missing event by listening for the progress event and in the handler comparing the amount of processed bytes with the total amount of bytes.