There are two important updates coming that could change the way your visitors experience your site. Now is the time to test those changes for yourself.

First, Flash Player 8.5 will be released soon, and if the adoption rate in any way mirrors the speed with which Flash 8 was adopted (we’re up to 84% on our site!) then this is going to matter right away. 8.5 will be a big update, and there’s no guarantee that existing code (yours) will behave the same as it does under Flash 8. So download the Flash Player 8.5 Public Beta and try it — now! There’s still time for you to alert the Flash team to any problems you discover, but the window is closing.

Second, IE updates are coming. Unless your visitor profile is VERY unusual, the majority of your site’s viewers use some version of Internet Explorer (currently 53% of visitors to our site, for example.) As you’ve certainly heard by now, the next round of updates to IE will include a change in how “Active Content” is treated (including Flash, Shockwave, QuickTime, etc.) In other words, your site may start behaving differently for a large percentage of your users, so it’s time to investigate whether it will affect you and decide how to address it.

One way to avoid worrying about the IE change is to load your SWFs using Geoff Stearns’ FlashObject detection and embed script, which we’ve been using anyway because it solves so many other problems. (Thanks, Geoff!)

Update: As Geoff notes in the comments, he has been providing updated details on this issue since December, so take advantage of his expertise!

A couple other links we stumbled across today which you may find handy in this context: How to use FlashObject with Frames; How to run multiple versions of IE concurrently.

Any other good resources people should know about?

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 30th, 2006 at 10:23 am and is filed under Culture, Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.