Today has been a fairly frustrating day, mainly because most of it has been spent following up on why some of our customers have been experiencing problems with our pages not loading properly. It turns out that these customers have one thing in common - they have all recently updated to Windows Vista… so what is going on?! It appears that updating to Vista has the potential to upset users using the Flash player. Here is what I’ve discovered so far:
- Windows Vista does not ship with any version of the Flash Player, so if you buy it in the stores and perform a clean install then you will need to grab the Flash player from Adobe and install it separately.
- Many OEM’s have refused to accept this, and are shipping hardware with both Vista and Flash pre-installed. As far as developers are concerned, there is no way of knowing which version of the player is being loaded, but its probably safe to assume it is a version 9 release.
- If you upgrade an existing install of Windows, you may break your Flash Player and have to reinstall. Last week Adobe released an updated version of the player, listing Windows Vista support in the feature list. If you have this version installed when you perform the update (9.0.28), then you should be fine. If you have an earlier version of Flash Player 9, then Flash web pages should still work, though you are obviously missing the Vista compatibility updates, whatever they may be. If you have an earlier version of the player, such as Flash Player 8, then the upgrade to Vista will somehow corrupt your player install. You will need to reinstall and the corrupted player will still register as installed to web pages using Flash (though it may not work).
I’ll post more updates as I get them, but at the moment its looking a bit messy!I am curious as to why Microsoft chose to ship Vista without Flash, or at least without ensuring that upgrading to the new OS doesn’t have any ill effects on browser plug-ins. I’m sure the conspiracy theorists will point to Microsoft wanting to damage the ubiquity of the Flash player ready for the roll-out of Redmond’s long rumored Flash-killer, but that doesn’t really make sense given that the said Flash-killer is still some time away. If anything this can be seen as a good thing, user experience implications aside, as it is driving updates to Flash 9 - enabling developers to really start kicking with ActionScript 3!Today has been a fairly frustrating day, mainly because most of it has been spent following up on why some of our customers have been experiencing problems with our pages not loading properly. It turns out that these customers have one thing in common - they have all recently updated to Windows Vista… so what is going on?! It appears that updating to Vista has the potential to upset users using the Flash player. Here is what I’ve discovered so far:
- Windows Vista does not ship with any version of the Flash Player, so if you buy it in the stores and perform a clean install then you will need to grab the Flash player from Adobe and install it separately.
- Many OEM’s have refused to accept this, and are shipping hardware with both Vista and Flash pre-installed. As far as developers are concerned, there is no way of knowing which version of the player is being loaded, but its probably safe to assume it is a version 9 release.
- If you upgrade an existing install of Windows, you may break your Flash Player and have to reinstall. Last week Adobe released an updated version of the player, listing Windows Vista support in the feature list. If you have this version installed when you perform the update (9.0.28), then you should be fine. If you have an earlier version of Flash Player 9, then Flash web pages should still work, though you are obviously missing the Vista compatibility updates, whatever they may be. If you have an earlier version of the player, such as Flash Player 8, then the upgrade to Vista will somehow corrupt your player install. You will need to reinstall and the corrupted player will still register as installed to web pages using Flash (though it may not work).
I’ll post more updates as I get them, but at the moment its looking a bit messy!I am curious as to why Microsoft chose to ship Vista without Flash, or at least without ensuring that upgrading to the new OS doesn’t have any ill effects on browser plug-ins. I’m sure the conspiracy theorists will point to Microsoft wanting to damage the ubiquity of the Flash player ready for the roll-out of Redmond’s long rumored Flash-killer, but that doesn’t really make sense given that the said Flash-killer is still some time away. If anything this can be seen as a good thing, user experience implications aside, as it is driving updates to Flash 9 - enabling developers to really start kicking with ActionScript 3!
Tags: Adobe, flash, flash player, flex, microsoft, vista, windows, windows vista