From: David Masover <ninja@...>
Date: 2009-09-12T09:30:14+09:00
Subject: Re: Rubyscript instead of javascript

On Friday 11 September 2009 12:11:51 pm Michal Suchanek wrote:

> How did you get the impression that flash is already installed?
>
> On Windows I do not get flash unless I install it,

Last I checked, Windows came out of the box with Flash installed and enabled, 
in IE. Or, at the very least, it was included with the last IE upgrade I did.

> In Firefox on Linux I normally do not have any flash.

I'll grant you that. However, I'm talking about Windows and OS X supporting 
this out of the box, and on Linux, well:

> If I do want it
> I have to download some tarball and find out where to put flash plugin
> (or perhaps run an installation script in terminal that might get the
> place right). Automatic download of the plugin does not work on Linux.

Depends on your distro. On Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree

But I'm less concerned by that, because with the scheme I described, Flash is 
being used to support browsers which won't support what I want natively -- 
which is likely to be IE, mostly. 

> I don't know about flash on OS X but it's the only platform I know of
> that has the Java plugins pre-installed.

Yes, it was pre-installed on OS X also, if I recall.

Keep in mind, I'm not just talking about preinstallations -- I'm talking about 
actual usage statistics. For instance:

http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/version_penetration.html

Granted, that's not exactly an unbiased source, but there isn't a market 
surveyed that had less than 97% penetration by Flash 9, and I have no reason 
to doubt those numbers.