Larry Mahony

Flash player help

January 26th, 2007

A lot of work we deliver uses Flash Player so we’ve encountered almost every issue under the sun that clients can have when they ring up and tell us “it’s not working”. You get the mix of ActiveX issues in IE, dodgy installs of the flash player, browser or server caching of older versions of work, incompatible drivers and a sprinkling of abnormal client behaviour! The joys of figuring out why the application doesn’t work for one guy in outer Mongolia even though it works for the the other 9,999 employees is indeed profound

We generally use SWFObject to embed Flash in a web page. If you are still using the default embed code or not using any detection you should switch to SWFObject, it’s a JavaScript method that allows for progressive enhancement.

There’s a handy little Firefox extension called FlashSwitcher which is useful when you do a lot of Flash work. It allows you to switch between different versions of the plugin by just clicking a button on the bottom right of the toolbar window.

Entry Filed under: Flash, Programming, Work