Flash 10 Headache

One of the problems inherent with being part of a very small (one person) development group, is that it is difficult to maintain the ability to test your site/application with every browser on every os with every new update and release. That is why, when I got that terrible email that says "I just installed Flash and the website doesn't work" I panicked.

What was calming, and frankly pretty funny, was upgrading myself to Flash 10  and wandering the internet looking at the large number of sites that didn't work properly.  The irony of seeing "Hey maybe you should update your Flash player" messages everywhere moments after getting the newest release.

The culprit? A little bit of javascript which was, in fact, the exact script recommended by Adobe in the first place. The purpose of this script is to make sure that the user has a new enough version of the plugin installed to get the full impact of your totally awesome Flash animations.  The problem is (here is where I probably bore some of you) that the script pulls in the description of your installed plugin, which might be something like "Shockwave Flash 10.0 r12". Well, that "10" used to be a "9" and had never before been two digits. Adobe's sample javascript just pull the ONE character to the left of that first period, and called that the version. Sadly, with Flash 10 installed, that script would think you had version ZERO which logic told it wasn't enough to handle state-of-the-art.  Nice forethought Adobe.