The Google way of detecting Flash…
“As much as Google loves and advocates the open web, there are still a few things that can be done with Flash. If you need to use Flash, you need to react gracefully if Flash is not installed.”
Read more at Google Doctype…
“… if Flash is not installed…” ??
Maybe one person in a hundred does not have any SWF capability. And at the last audit, only a few weren’t on the current major version:
http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/version_penetration.html
That JavaScript looks sort of bloat-y to impose on everyone just to check whether a few don’t have the usual surfing experience…?
(I’m not sure why they’d even bother doing a version-check for Macromedia Flash Player 2!!)
I think that test may also fail on plugin-using browsers like Opera, which can spoof their user_agent as MSIE.
jd/adobe
John Dowdell
May 16, 2008 at 2:10 am
Surely most of us are using swfobject by now? It’s good practice to check either way… and ideally serve up standards based content if Flash is unavailable.
Tom H
May 16, 2008 at 10:40 am