Over the last few years, there has been a lot of debate about the Flash Player. I have always told people that the Flash was the best plug-in that you could use. While this is a bold statement, I believe Adobe’s upcoming release of Flash CS3 will help Flash solidify its future as the Rich Internet Application (RIA) development environment of choice. See for yourself – what Flash has to offer may surprise you!

Cross-platform Compatibility
Flash Player is available for every major operating system:

  • Windows
  • Mac OS
  • Linux
  • Solaris

Adobe has also released a scaled down version of the Flash Player called Flash Lite, which lets you view Flash content on your mobile phone and PDA. There are more than 14 mobile phone manufacturers that are already pre-loading Flash Lite into their devices and almost 200 cell phone models are Flash-enabled.

Still not convinced? Well, let’s talk about cross-browser compatibility. That’s right; I said the 26 letter word. One of the most amazing advantages to using Flash is that it has very very few cross-browser compatibility problems and the few that it does have are usually related to browser caching or the code used to place the flash object on a site*. Macromedia says 98 percent of browsers include the Flash Player. That’s a huge number of browsers! At this point, Flash has successfully found a way to make the browser standards war completely a non-issue when it comes to their product. Flash gives us a way around the whole mess.

Updating the Flash Player
Flash Player 8 includes automatic update functionality that will periodically check to make sure that you have the latest version of the Flash Player. Previously, updating the Flash Player was a matter of trying to view some flash content that was published for a newer Flash version, or going to the Macromedia (now Adobe) website and downloading the update manually.

When you try to view Flash content that is published for a newer Flash version, there is typically a line or two of code that will attempt to download and install the latest version of Flash behind the scenes so you can view the content on that site. This is still the case today, although the automatic Flash Player updater will probably update most versions of Flash 8 before many people run into a movie they can’t see.

The Power of Flash
In addition to being wide-spread and easy to update, the Flash Player has much more power that any other web-based plug-ins. Most other plug-ins are limited to playback without the ability to accept user interaction.

Flash, on the other hand, has much more to offer. With Flash you can: Create Dynamic and Interactive Websites, Build Single and Multiplayer Online Games, Create Dazzling Ad Banners, Develop Online Video Conferencing (Using the Flash Communication Server), Create Multimedia presentations, Build Chat and Messaging Applications, Load and manipulate images, such as JPEGs, GIFs and PNGs, Load and parse XML (The Release Flash Player 9 and ActionScript 3 are going to make this REALLY easy using E4X… Read More), Communicate with any major server-side technology like PHP, ASP.NET, ColdFusion, Java, etc., Load MP3s at runtime, and also import audio files like WAV and AIFF, and Load and play video (Sites such as YouTube use Flash for video playback). These are just a FEW of the things you can do with Flash.

As you can see, Flash is the most powerful web-based plug-in you can use. With over 98% of users already using the Flash Player and a new automatic update feature in Flash 8, the Flash Player will continue to dominate the RIA market and enhance the user experience for years to come.

*The most common compatibility problems exist while including Flash in the HTML, or in the case of some browsers, support of parameters like transparency.