Flash 10 penetration and plugin implications

[Scott Witte]

This question is mostly for Hans but I suspect others may be interested or have thoughts.

In September Adobe revealed that the upgrade to Flash 10 was the quickest ever (http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/version_penetration.html), reaching 94% in North America, 92% in Europe. By extension it must be significantly higher now.

Hans, You have the best real world statistics I am aware of. Do these figures seem accurate to you?

If Flash 10 has reached this penetration, I feel we can safely design plugins for Flash 10 if that offers some real advantage. When using them we simply require users have or upgrade to v10 to view that pano. Essentially everyone would be there anyway.

Heck, you might reasonably justify requiring Flash 10 regardless just to guarantee the best performance possible. Although I would still prefer to make it optional, if there were a way to do that.

Make sense?

[Trausti Hraunfjord]

The stats from my sites indicate around 85% using F10. (no regional divisions here, just one pool).

I don't think it would be anything "wrong" in "forcing" people to update to the latest FREE Flash player. If they had to BUY it, it would absolutely be questionable. When game-makers create their games, they don't limit themselves to the fact that 90% of the world's computers can not play their games, without costly updates having to be carried out by the consumers.... and people make those upgrades in order to be able to play... and normally the upgrades cost more than the games.

In comparison, "forcing" people to make a needed upgrade that costs them nothing but a few seconds of their time, seems only to be fair. We should not limit ourselves to the technology of last century, just because there are "some" people out there that are not interested in having their free software up to date.

A few days ago my programmer was looking into making "Real Box" hotspots (an addition to spot and box), where plugins can be distorted into place... for instance a mp3 plugin player could be skewed to fit an angle of a stereo equipment or some such. It opens up a whole new level of doing things.

[HansNyberg]

I do not believe Adobes numbers are true at least no worldwide.
I have a difficulties to get stats for all my visitors as about 25% are detected as "Not Set" by Analytics, Most of them are coming from Stumbleupon and are Firefox users.

However I looked at all Google searches as they are visitors from all the world and using keywords which gives visitors of all kind.

This is for the last month.

Google sent 60,442 visits via 25,909 keywords and 77 flash versions
Flash10 82,9%
Not Set 4,36%