I have been thinking of doing some work with Flash and/or Flex on afeeda recently and one thing that has always held me back from considering Flex is its dependence on v9 of the flash player.
Now we have a decent amount of traffic for afeeda, I thought it would be worth taking a look at the version distribution across flash players for our visitors.
That is 89% of visitors ready to run Flex content, that is pretty reasonable. I am not planning on being dependent on any Flex so I think that is the answer I need to go ahead with investigation/development with some Flex now.
The only worrying thing is why people have such a huge distribution of v9.xxx players, I thought the flash player had an auto-update in it after a certain version so what is up with that?
Silverlight will really have to hustle to get that kind of penetration.
Disclaimer: These are the stats for afeeda only, your visitors may differ to ours.
The flash player, as far as I know, doesn’t auto update. The update bit comes in the script that you add to the containing page in which you specify the version number you require for your content. So if you only specify V 9 then any V 9 (or above I think) will do which gives the distribution of 9xxx players you are seeing.