Now that we're kicking out Flex apps left and right. we have to deal with Flash Player version detection. Thankfully. Flex Builder generates all that code for us - what a relief!

I thought I'd document what the user experience is for different states of flash player detection just for kicks. It's likely that most people haven't seen these differing experiences because. as web developers. we tend to keep up to date with plugins. My father. on the other hand. does not!

First up. the user experience if you have Flash Player 9 installed:

Next up: Flash Player 6.0.79 - the latest version of Flash Player that supports the "upgrade in place" feature. 6.0.65 is the minimum version to do this. I bet this is what most people will see for a little while...

And finally. the experience of people who don't have Flash installed OR have disabled JavaScript.

It's important to note that you can control the text message that's displayed when this happens just by tweaking the Javascript a little bit.

Overall. the script works flawlessly and handles that whole Active Content issue with IE without a hitch. Thank you. Adobe. for abstracting me out of the equation of player detection! Just one gotcha that bit me: don't forget to upload the "playerProductInstall.swf" file to the server or the upgrade-in-place feature will not work at all!