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Our users are older salespeople, most of whom don't understand the concept of a plugin, so telling them to update their flash player is not an option (I have tried in the past).

However, updating our application to Flex 4 (from 3.5) is something I would like to atleast plan on doing in the future.

The question is, what is the market saturation of flash player 10? What would be the easiest way to determine how many of our users have flash player 10? Any other hints/advice for considering upgrading to flex 4 would be great!

Thanks!

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migrated from stackoverflow.com Apr 20 '11 at 10:35

2 Answers

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If your users are using Chrome, it's not a problem since Chrome updates Flash automatically. The flash player penetration is 99% for 10 and above. The Flash update process is fairly pain free IMO. Most of them should of gotten a popup saying they should update and if they accept, downloads and installs without any user interaction.

If it hasn't done that already, having an express install on your site will help a lot alleviate any concern. It comes bundled in with SWFObject as well, which you should be using anyways :P

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Of course I use SWFObject, but I remember the market saturation was at 87% last year, and we released a tool in flex 4. We received like 75+ calls within 45 minutes that our site was broken (they didn't know why were prompting them to upgrade flash). We still find some of our users using IE6, killing themselves slowly. – andrewpthorp Apr 18 '11 at 20:52
Tell them to get a clue? You can't continue supporting software that's old. I mean, IE6 is ancient... – J_A_X Apr 18 '11 at 21:04
I don't even code for IE6 anymore. Although most of my recent development is going towards inner office applications so I don't have to worry about it. but +1 for being a SWFObject fan. – The_asMan Apr 18 '11 at 21:43
Obviously we don't support IE6 (and trust me, most of our users are on something better, but we have seen a few IE6 users here or there), but the point remains, if they aren't willing to upgrade to flash 10, how can you encourage it? One thing we have considered is adding something to our site that warns our current customers the change is coming, then adding very detailed explanations on our swf pages. – andrewpthorp Apr 18 '11 at 22:12
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You can refer to official statistics from Adobe and this unofficial one. For determining your users version statistics you can embed 1x1 size SWF into your page with minimal Flash Player requirements and send Player version on a server.

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That statistic says 99% of mature markets (I assume the USA is one) have flash 10+, I hope that is true! – andrewpthorp Apr 18 '11 at 20:52

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