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Is Flash Really On 99% of Net Devices?
Barence writes "Adobe claims that its Flash platform reaches '99% of internet viewers,' but a closer look at those statistics suggests it's not exactly all-encompassing. Adobe puts Flash player penetration at 947 million users out of a total 956 million internet-connected devices, but the total number of PCs is based on a forecast made two years ago. What's more, the number of Flash users is based on a questionable internet survey of just 4,600 people — around 0.0005% of the suggested 956,000,000 total. Is it really possible that 99% penetration could have been reached? Including Linux users? Including users at work? Including brand-new systems?"
If these sites had tiny embedded flash objects whose sole purpose was to test for successful loading or not you would be able to get a ton more stats that any survey. How much do you think they could charge for data like this?
The fact is the vast majority of people that are targeted do have Flash (especially compared to those with Silverlight) and that's all most people decided whether or not to flash will care about.
"Is it really possible that 99% penetration could have been reached? Including Linux users? Including users at work? Including brand-new systems?"
No.
- Ramanujam
Of course not! It's more like 98.5%
I'm proud to be in the 1% of people who haven't been penetrated by Flash.
Flash was originally crafted with the best of intentions, I'm sure, but due to gross misuse by virtually everyone who's ever touched it, Flash has become a blight on the face of the Tubes. Whether it's noisy and annoying ads, embedded-but-not-linked video, site navigation without a plain HTML version, or malware-pushing securityless redirects, Flash has earned its rightful place in /dev/null.
Is that, as I child of the 70s, it brings to mind the act of exposing yourself. In the 70s the image of this was a pervert wearing a trenchcoat.
I do browse the Internet with my BlackBerry Pearl, and no, I cannot get Flash video on it. Was the definition of "Internet viewer" tailored to purpose, by any chance?
It would be more interesting to conduct a survey to find what percentage of net users find Flash as annoying as I do.
Maybe some download stats for Flashblock? I would have to agree that Flash is now more or less inescapable, especially if you like YouTube, but if a site is built on Flash it's usually a surefire sign that the content won't be worth the bandwidth.
Please, this "how can just 4600 people represent so many" comment is something any college-educated person should know better than to say. Provided the sample was drawn randomly from a representative pool of users, 4600 people is more than adequate, giving a sampling error of about 2%.
Based on an iron clad study, 99% of people that visit adobe.com have flash.
You just can't argue statistics like that, man.
According to the latest "Market Share" survey Windows, Mac and Linux users combined represent more than 99% of the web users. Flash is available on all those platforms and more.
But considering that on some platform, users may be dumb enough not to be able to install Flash, that some users may not want to install Flash for its close-sourceness this number could very well just above 98%. I mean that's a shame Adobe are lying with those numbers and should apologize to everyone for making up numbers so easily.
You are right on the money to have discover such an evil plot.
--- Bouh !!! ---
The fact that the sample is a very small fraction of the total population does not make it meaningless.
It may be meaningless for OTHER reasons of course...
Even if true now that number will trend downward rapidly from now on. Flash support on Linux has always been ordinary, especially on anything other than x86 processors. Given the next wave of netbooks are likely to be ARM devices (especially the really cheap ones) they're going to have a really hard time keeping up unless they do something drastic like open source the player itself. Flash constantly crashes WebKit nightlies on OS X and the same is true of every experience with Flash I've had outside of the mainstream browsers.
Definitely good to see some critical analysis done though... I much prefer native web applications and with HTML 5's video tag and application features Flash will really become quite optional.
I would go so far as to say that Flash penetration could drop below 50% in the coming years given these two new kids on the block alone.
Sam
A forecast from 2 years ago might have assumed Flash Lite getting onto more mobile platforms than it has. The iPhone & iPod Touch, for example, certainly take a decent chunk of the mobile market at the moment, and neither can run Flash.
This sig intentionally left justified.
The survey was made in flash
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Saying that Flash can be viewed by "99% of internet viewers" is not saying that Flash is on "99% of internet devices." My Centro doesn't have Flash, but my work laptop does, so I'd say "yes" if polled about whether I have access to Flash content. My ratio of internet devices to Flash-capable devices (5:2) doesn't interest Abobe.
Their claim is probably about right.
--I'm so big, my sig has its own sig.
-- See?
[I also posted a portion of this on the original site but thought it might also be useful here.]
Being a Technical Evangelist for Adobe I frequently get questioned about our published statistics. My response is that you should always test YOUR user base before you make a decision about building on any technology. And in most cases when companies do their own testing the results are within one percent of our published numbers. This is true for enterprise's, SMBs, media companies, etc. But occasionally I hear about some demographic where the numbers are totally off. For instance, if your user base is still working on green screens then you will find lower Flash Player penetration numbers there.
I think Slashdot should publish their stats about their users. It would be interesting to see what the Flash Player penetration is like with this demographic - especially considering I sometimes see Flash banner ads on Slashdot.
-James (Adobe)
I make every effor to avoid installing Flash on any system I use, and once I do install it, I make sure it won't run automatically (FF+noscript) to avoid all the annoyances as reduce security problems.
So, even if they do manage to get a high penetration, you need to also look at how many system will flash actually run on!
There's no flash on the iPhone.
Oh shit! I forgot to click "Post Anonymously"...
My Nokia N810 is an ARM device, and it has Flash. Not the latest version and not powerful enough to run high-def videos, but it's there. Silverlight? Hah!
I don't think one can expect all business PC's to connect to the internet at all, so those wouldn't count as web 'enabled'. Lots of firewalls and site blockers out there that could mess with the stats. However, I do think once someone uses the internet for 5 minute they'll eventually be asked to install flash to show a webpage properly. Youtube, Hulu... ect. Very important part of the web browser to have that installed.
You could just go the HTML route...
w3c claims that its HTML platform reaches '100% of interweb viewers,' but a closer look at those statistics suggests it's not exactly all-encompassing. w3c puts HTML-capable web browser penetration at 956 million users out of a total 956 million internet-connected devices, but the total number of PCs is based on a forecast made two years ago. What's more, the number of HTML users is based on a questionable internet survey of just 4,600 people - around 0.0005% of the suggested 956,000,000 total. Is it really possible that 100% penetration could have been reached? Including Linux users? Including users at work? Including brand-new systems?
99% seems an ambitious estimate. 64-bit Flash, for example, is still in testing, and many distributions still do not include it. What about the myriad CPU architectures used in embedded devices? Different browsers? Different operating systems?
Perhaps if it were an open standard, it could be more widely supported, instead of supported only on those platforms selected by Adobe.
... my guess is that flash penetration has to be at least significant, since youtube uses flash practically exclusively before you can view any videos. I'd like to see numbers from major video streaming sites and other flash using sites as well.
I know that I sometimes get peeved when I am asked to download a file like quicktime or some other format now instead of just stream it via flash.
I love flash and I think it's time to start lobbying Adobe to make Flash Open Source Software. I know its specs are open but we don't know what tool Microsoft might be planning now with its Silverlight platform.
If we succeeded with Sun's Java, we surely can succeed with Adobe's Flash. This will mean that these wonderful pieces of software can be bundled with Linux by default --- Sweet!
One thing I still miss are picture controls on all those video sites including Youtube. You sometimes need to put a little light, hue and contrast into those pictures.
Moonlight will compile on ARM, IIRC. (May be wrong, but I heard something about that.)
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
After a lifetime of riding motorcycle... computers make me a 1%er. Flash sux!
Call me an old fogey but I don't see the need for multimedia content in browsers when I have perfectly good programs to do that on my desktop. Youtube? I use youtube-dl and play the file with mplayer. So I miss out on a few crappy Flash games. Big deal.
I'd expect tech readers to have a modicum of statistical sense, but the arguments presented in the summary display an embarrasing ignorance of established statistical techniques. The central limit theorem - one of the first things taught on any stats course - suggests that the sample size is more than adequate, and the researchers have made a serious attempt to take a representative sample across coutries, age groups and genders.
The flaws in the research are more subtle but aren't picked up in the summary. First, beware of any vendor-funded survey - you can guarantee that the although the underlying facts are probably accurate, the interpretation will spun to the point of incredulity. Also, there's probably good reason to believe that people who take part in email surveys aren't representative of the wider population.
But the real problem is that the survey muddles up devices and people: the research discovered that 99% of people can read see Flash animations, but that doesn't remotely mean that 99% of internet-connected devices have Flash. My phone is connected to the innternet, but it certainly can't read Flash files, for example, but I generally read emails on my PC not my phone
Having said that, the results smell about right. Almost all PCs have Flash because it's so easy to install these days - even on Linux./P
They claim 99% penetration, but there is still no 64bit version of their player for my Windows or Linux OS?
The Wii browser for example uses an rampantly outdated version of the Flash player and is incompatible with oh so many sites. I bet this is true for many other platforms as well.
There claims are full of shit what about all the people the use the ps3 online in both XMB and Linux flavor. All adobe have ever offered is buggy software that sucks. And don't even get me started on acrobat.
It didn't help that the survey was done using a flash app. Some might say that skewed the results somewhat.
Way to transport our message. We like the way you created authenticity by questioning our numbers without actually refuting them. Your check is in the mail.
Yours sincerely,
Adobe
or just Barence?
4600 people is a pretty big sample size for pretty much any population size. This will give 99% confidence of a +/-0.38% margin of error (assuming you're expecting a result in the high nineties). If the survey is questionable, it's not because of the numbers - you'd be looking for selection bias (and similar factors).
Barence also seems unable to understand the difference between internet *users* and internet *devices*. If you have a desktop PC that can do Flash, it doesn't matter whether your iPhone can or not.
How do they survey the people they can't reach or only speak something like Vietnamese?
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
/. should not be a forum for perpetrating common ignorance, such as the comment,
"What's more, the number of Flash users is based on a questionable internet survey of just 4,600 people â" around 0.0005% of the suggested 956,000,000 total. Is it really possible that 99% penetration could have been reached?"
They really needed to survey just 1,000 people to get a statistically meaningful survey.
It does not pass the smell test because it leaves out a number of important devices we know to exist on the Internet (for example, the iPhone).
The problem is almost certainly sample bias. 1,000 data points is significantly relevant if your sample is truly random and not skewed towards a particular subgroup. Sample bias means that your mechanism for picking who you sampled would be more likely to pull data points from a specific subgroup. For example, a methodology that discouraged responses from people on mobile devices.
TFA quotes Adobe's fine print (some of it anyway) in which Adobe specifically states "desktop computers".
Un huh. That says a lot, considering most of the people I know no longer use desktop computers to access the Internet.
I'll bet the binary codecs from Microsoft run GREAT on ARM.
LOL
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Here's the quote from Adobe's site...
Adobe ® Flash ® Player is the world's most pervasive software platform, used by over 2 million professionals and reaching 99.0% of Internet-enabled desktops in mature markets as well as a wide range of devices
It's interesting that Adobe defines Flash as a "software platform". A javascript-enabled browser could also be defined as such- which would make Adobe's claims of "most pervasive" false, since there are many sites which use javascript but not flash.
Mature Markets include US, Canada, UK, France, Germany, Japan.
Hm, seems like they left out a few ...
Of course, they just want to make people to feel comfortable paying top dollar for their products. (And as someone faced with buying a copy of Flash or Adobe CS4 soon, Holy Cow it's expensive!)
Statistics never lie.
The use of two year-old data for projecting the current Internet population may or may not be questionable, but there's nothing at all wrong with extrapolating from sample of 4600 to a population of one billion -- or any size.
It's a curious result of probability theory that, assuming your sample is truly random (which is HARD to achieve!), the sample size you need is independent of the size of the population you're examining. It doesn't matter whether there are a million, hundred million or hundred trillion Internet-connected computers, a random sample of 4600 is equally good.
Yes, this is counterintuitive, like so much else in probability theory.
When choosing an appropriate sample size what matters is the rarity of the trait you're searching for, the margin of error you want to allow, and the degree of confidence you want to have in your result. It's an interesting circularity that you need to know how common computers without Flash are in order to determine how large a sample you need to determine how common computers without Flash are. In practice it isn't a big deal, though. You guess at your answer, compute the required sample size, perform your sampling operation, then see what answer the sample provided. If it's not close to your assumed answer, then you use the sample as the basis of a new assumption and compute a required sample size for your desired level of confidence. If needed, you sample some more. Usually, though, you can make a good enough initial guess that one round is sufficient.
This is why pollsters can give 3% error margins and 95% confidence intervals for voter preferences even though there are many millions of voters and they only ask a thousand or so. The fact that getting good random samples is so hard explains why pollsters nevertheless do get it wrong from time to time. But asking more people wouldn't help, since the additional samples would likely have the same unknown bias as the first thousand -- or perhaps if they were chosen a different way they'd have a different unknown bias.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
All of the planned ARM netbooks I know about use the i.MX515 chip from Freescale. One of the selling points in the brochure about this chip discusses its performance running Flash. I think it's fair to assume that these machines will all support Flash.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Last generation low budgets Mobiles phones have internet access and could be considered net devices....
Damia
I happen to have access to an Omniture account, so I checked their numbers. Omniture says that 100% of the people going to my company's website have Flash installed, and Omniture also says that the internet average is 87.4%. While Adobe's sample size may be large enough to be statistically valid, I think Omniture's sample size is much larger, and therefore, much more accurate.
I wish people would understand sample size before claiming it as a weak point.
A sample is by definition a small slice of a population.
Sample size is not a weak or strong aspect of the analysis based on what its ratio is to the entire population, it is weak or strong based on the confidence level you end up with.
Example: If you have a sample size of 4300 people and your resultant confidence level is 99%, then even if you have a total population of 6 billion people, your sample size is perfectly fine. If, however, your confidence level is 95%, the statistical results should be questioned as to their accuracy wrt the entire population.
I don't know what the confidence level of Adobe's survey was, but the summary should not be throwing its results into question based on the sample size to total population ratio, it makes the person sound stupid.
> Is Flash Really On 99% of Net Devices?
I don't think I'm going to install Flash on my ethernet repeater and neither are you.
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
I have a Blackberry and use it to browse the net. It doesn't have Flash. Something like >14 million people have Blackberries, and >8 million people have iPhones. Those devices don't support Flash yet,though a player is in development for the iPhone. Additionally some of the most savvy web users don't run scripts, including Flash, for security reasons. This story sounds like Adobe-flavored Kool Aid.
What's more, the number of Flash users is based on a questionable internet survey of just 4,600 people -- around 0.0005% of the suggested 956,000,000 total.
That's the single dumbest thing you can say about polling results. I just asked this question on the last test of the statistics class I teach two weeks ago. Neither population size, nor ratio of the population polled, are in any way factors in the accuracy of a poll.
Opinion polling margin of error is computed as follows (95% level of confidence): E = 1/sqrt(n) = 1/sqrt(4600) = +/-1%. So the actual percent of Flash users is 95% likely to be somewhere between 98% and 100%. Again, note that population size is not a factor in the formula for margin of error.
As a side note, polling calculations are actually most accurate if you had an infinite population size (that's one of the standard mathematical assumptions in the model). If anything, a complication arises if population size gets too small, at which point a correction formula can be added if the polling ratio rises over 5% of the population or so.
There might be other legitimate critiques of any poll (like perhaps a biased sampling method). But a small polling ratio is not one of them. It's about as ignorant a thing as you can say when interpreting poll results (on the order of "the Internet is not a truck").
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margin_of_error#Effect_of_population_size
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Without Flash you can't view YouTube, Google video, Vimeo, Fora, etc. etc. etc. These little Flash video players all suck like vacuum cleaners, compared even to Windows Media Player, but without them you won't be watching the videos. It's really frustrating, since the technology for something better is there, now, but everyone sticks with nonfunctional players and a crappy codec.
That way I avoid the Flash adds. I can enable it when I need it, such as to use a site that has useful functionality written in Flash.
Not me, they didn't... :P
Had they, I would have told them that I do use the Flash browser plugin, and that it has improved greatly over the past year with far fewer lockups/crashes, and I would add a "Thanks" for them for supporting Linux.
I would also ask them that they Please, For The Love Of God And All That Is Holy, PLEASE actively discourage web developers from making Flash-only websites, or at least provide alternate, non-Flash ways to access the site content along with the "bling".
Not that there aren't some good, purely Flash-based sites out there, but because well functioning, appropriate implementation of the technology does seem to be in the minority in my experience. After all, they don't want Flash to become the new Front Page... ;)
"...there are some things that can beat smartness and foresight. Awkwardness and stupidity can." ~ Mark Twain
So they predict that 99% of the world uses flash because they surveyed 4,600 Adobe employees I'm guessing?
Only 60% of the users in my organization have flash installed. :)
Less than 20% of the computers do. (Far more servers than workstations
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Most of my customers on dial-up now use Firefox so they can get the "no-Flash plugin" and keep it OFF by default. So, are they counting these people, too?
Ever go to a site like "BoostMobile" on dial-up? They are SO polluted with Flash animations that it takes up to 40 minutes for the homepage to load-in. YES...I said 40 minutes. If you accidentally hit the wrong link and have to go back...FORGET IT!
Besides that, there are WAY MORE dial-up users than they want you to believe. If an ISP has ONE person in the whole county with HI-SPEED Net access....they are allowed to *count the whole county as COVERED*. This also prevents competition from coming in and trying to setup a competing service....just like our "cable-vision".
Yes....we had all the cables laid WAY BEFORE the sats were up there for HBO and the likes. We had a "community antenna system" because we were so far from the TV stations. This gave us (in the town) HBO and MTV at least 3 years before places like Detroit and other major cities ever got it. They were too busy arguing about using each other's poles to run "strand".
So...as someone who has been taking care of these people's computers over the last 12-15 years, I can tell you that the average dial-up user is very happy if they get 2.8kbs on their 56k modem. When the speeds are THAT SLOW....you turn "Flash Animation" OFF just as fast and as often as you can!!
Seeing the "TEXT ONLY" option (like BBC offers) brings "tears of joy" to these people.
I wouldn't expect any of you that have only had HI-SPEED Net from day-1 to even have a clue as to how most of us LOATHE sites drenched in "FLASH"!!!
At least for your own site, google analytics will not only tell you what proportion of users have flash installed but also which version.
For example, on my sites (4 medium/smallish commercial sites with around 1000 visits per day each) 45% of users have Flash 10.0 r12, 53% have some version of Flash 9, and 3% have "not set," which is probably split between users with no Flash and users with something that blocks GA's data collection (things such as no script could do this, but I think this is unlikely as noscript has google whitelisted by default).
So, for my sites, the number of users without Flash installed is probably between 0 and 3%. I think it is closer to 3% than 0, but anybody else's guess is as good as mine.
The point is, the overwhelming majority of users have flash.
That tidbit aside, I must say that IMHO using Flash is for anything but movies and games is incredibly bad form. There is no reason whatsoever to have flash menus, navigation or anything else that can be handled in html, css or javascript. Flash destroys accessibility, distracts from your message and is just annoying for visitors.
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
Flash is pretty ubiquitous. It comes on every Windows PC loaded with Internet Explorer, and it's an easy download for Macs and Linux machines. The Android phone OS from Google supports Flash, and Adobe has announced a working Flash for iPhone, simply awaiting Apple's go-ahead. The new Palm Pre phone will have Flash. Windows Mobile has Flash Lite. Probably, Apple will allow Flash if Pre and Android phone sales take off.
Youtube pretty much ensured Flash's predominance. Suddenly, there was an easy, painless way to watch video and listen to audio without having to mess with Realplayer and Windows Multimedia codecs and stupid digital rights management code that only works in certain versions of MS Windows.
It's interesting how Flash took the web app market away from Java. Flash is the big player in interactive web apps, while Java is a bit player. Java is still huge in server side apps but it's dead on the desktop. I can't even get Java applets to run on my current home machine with Firefox and Suse Linux, but I have no incentive to get it working. There are still a couple of web sites out there that use java applets for their user interface widgets, but these are few and far between.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
Because Adobe Flash does not exist on FreeBSD, the userbase here with FreeBSD doesn't have Adobe Flash.
... but most phones can be considered "net devices" these days, certainly an increasing number have browsers of some sort. And nearly none of those have flash.
(Frankly, I'm kind of glad. I don't really want to think what flash-animated websites would do to my phone's battery life...)
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
Most blackberries and iPhone don't have flash capability and those phones are the majority of web-enabled phones by marketshare.
Let's say Adobe has scewed the results in their favour by a few percent. So it's like 95 or 93%. Bit fat hairy deal. Flash still is the most ubiqious plattform in existance with such frictionless deployment to the end user you'll be hard pressed to find something that even comes close. The closest is Java, and Java Webstart isn't quite there yet. JavaFX isn't truely cross-plattform and I can't think of any other feasable rich client plattform even worth mentioning. And no, Silverlight isn't even a nominee, as Curl, Prisim/XULRunner, SMIL/RealPlayer and a few others have much more penetration.
And since compiling without the official Flash IDE has gotten very easy with MTASC and the Flex SDK I see no reason not to use it for complex RIA projects.
Flash has been the RIA king for at least 10 years now, and unless Sun finsishes the last 20% of JavaFX (true x-plattform is still missing) it will still stay that way for while.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Lots of tracking software has ways to account for people like you. Xiti, for example, loads both a script and a small image. They err on the side of caution and assume that people who load the image but not the script have fairly restrictive settings. So, Xiti tells me that after filtering out bots 2% of my users have js dis-activated, although I believe that the actual percentage is lower. If I assume that all of those users have flash disabled and combine that with the fact that Javascript-based Google analytics tells me that 3% of my users either don't have Flash or that it doesn't recognize their flash version, at most 5% of my visitors don't have Flash and the actual number is probably a small fraction of that.
In general, I do not advocate the use of Flash in web design, but you cannot deny that it is nearly ubiquitous.
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
The site http://riastats.com/ gives general statistics on Flash, Silverlight, and Java installs. Much like Google Analytics, it also allows a site-specific tracker to be installed.
From the general stats, looks like Flash isn't at 99% but is the most widely installed 3rd party tech (that it tracks.) And with almost 1.5 million users, I'd give it more weight for accuracy than Adobe's survey of a few thousand users.
I get 1 500 unique visitors on my website every month and 1,34% of visitors don't have ANY version of Flash.
Moonlight can be compiled against ffmpeg (my Gentoo box has Moonlight compiled like this and it works fine) so the codecs from MS are not necessary.
Linux Wireless Hardware in the UK
Are anywhere near 1% of desktop machines single-boot pure Linux systems? Even most "Omg 3% this is the year of the Linux desktop!" people dual-boot.
4600 is statistically acceptable from the perspective of sampling error.
This however does not say anything at all about whether those 4600 are a representable sample of the wider population.
For example, if you phone around to the home telephones of Londoners at 6PM and ask what they work in, and if they answer 'finance' you ask them what their bonus was for 2009, you might get a certain average. This would however not capture anyone who works later than [6PM minus travel time], or have an unlisted number, of have reserved themselves against telephone surveys. While purporting to represent the average London bonus, your survey would really only capture the average bonus of people who don't work late.
In this case, the survey result could be skewed by the accessibility of the survey. If the survey is only accessible on Adobe's website through a banner, that might not capture people who only use the internet for online banking. If it was only in English, it might not capture many Chinese. Scratch that - unless it was accessible in every language on the planet, it would exclude people of any language not represented, and you would have to assume that penetration for them is equally large as for other nations. Not that it's a bad assumption, but "sampling representativeness" is one of the big statistical ponies.
I think it's very likely that it reaches 99% of humans who have internet access.
Quick survey:
* Mac laptop: Yes
* Ubuntu desktop: Yes
* Eee running Ubuntu: Yes
* Sidekick: No
* Wii: Yes, I think?
So out of five browsing devices I have, four have flash -- but *I* can view flash content, even though some of my devices can't.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
While I call bullshit on these numbers, it is important to keep in mind that Flash comes preinstalled on every Windows PC since Win95. The little windows 'intro' thing is an old flash movie, or you can choose the 'text only intro' when you install XP, but flash is there all the same.
The preinstalled copy is version 4 I think, so its effectively worthless now days, but its a great way to inflate their bullshit numbers in a semi-legitimate way.
Reading the summary I had the impression it was another kdawson post.
What's the Slashdot obsession with bashing Flash I will never know.
First, the survey was not about 'net devices' but personal computers. Big difference.
Second, a sample size of 4600 is more than adequate to represent the whole internet population, provided it's random enough.
Third, even if the number is a bit inflated -- ok, it's not 99%, let's say it's 96.8% Are you happy now? Does it make you feel better?
So far, I have not encountered one computer without flash. Not one out of hundreds. If you use Firefox with Noscript on a Gentoo system, good for you - you're special.
I'll give you another bit of info: most people outside Slashdot like flash. I haven't heard anyone complaining.
Finally, if tomorrow flash would disappear, do you honestly believe the internet would be a better place? I hope you're not that naive. Silverlight, Java, Quicktime, Html canvas, svg will take its place in a web 2.0 mashup orgy and you'll be as annoyed as ever.
That happens to me all the time. I reach 99% penetration and all I hear is "Are you sure?"
The sample size is fine. A sample size of 4600 from a population of 956 million gives a margin of error of only 1.44%. The larger error is in estimating the population size.
They should get some REAL flash on the PSP. The newest firmware only supports flash 6. So yes, it has flash, but the only content available is some flash games. 'Till then I'll just have to kick my brother off my computer every time I wanna watch someone jump out their second story window.
Well, if we're including the Iphone, then why forget that there were, you know, other phones before the Iphone? Try hundreds of millions of Internet enabled phones, the vast majority of which won't have flash.
Clearly, their statistics don't include phones at all. What's more, if you RTFA, you'll see they state "PC Penetration". Is the Iphone a PC? I don't think so. Admittedly their "Flash content reaches 99.0% of Internet viewers" headline is misleading, but the first paragraph does clarify "Internet-enabled desktops". Is the Iphone a "desktop"? Again, I don't think so.
In most cases Flash only websites are the way to go - it's the only way to ensure that in all browsers your content will look/perform the same, and will be displayed in an engaging and interactive way.
Also given that it looks like the next version of Flash will be the same (effectively) for all platforms and devices, i wouldn't expect that Adobe has anything to worry about in terms of its usage in the future.
Have a look at http://www.openscreenproject.org/partners/ and then tell me it isn't laughable (at particularly this moment in time) to raise the question of how ubiquitous and important Flash will continue to be.
Well 4500 completely random surveys taken in the U.S. fairly accurately represents the entire U.S. population.. So I would have to say those results are flawed being that maybe around 12000 random surveying's would be more realistic for nearly a billion computers
There's no Flash on my effing G1 either. Another million or so missing there.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Microsoft loves you!
Correct me if I am wrong, but why are you attacking the sample size? In US political polls they usually have 1000 as a sample size, which is 1% of the total US population, it doesn't matter the size as long as you use proper statistical methodology and have a randomly selected sampling system.
Clearly there are flaws in their methodology, they are skewing things to look higher than they are by excluding internet capable devices that don't use flash.
But if I remember my statistics right the sample size isn't strictly the flaw in their methods.
I'm tempted to say "Who cares?" at this point.
Just about the only people without Flash are the people running obscure platforms who *know* they're missing stuff like Flash; people browsing on crap cell phones, who also know they're missing out; and a third group of want-to-be-self-righteous people missing out on purpose so they can troll.
The silly "What about grandmas running Windows 3.1 who don't know how to install plug-ins?" arguments are pointless because people like that are going to have bigger problems than Flash anyway. Hell, if you're still running Windows 98, I wouldn't be surprised if the malware on your machine will install Flash for you.
Maybe not
Because if it was, that's some brilliant deceptive research! :p
Even more annoying than intellectually bankrupt beauty-queens that go into politics. Solution: Don't install Flash (or remove it, if your system came pre-infected). I really don't care to see the You-Tube baffoonery - it's of no interest; and missing all the Flash advertising is well worth it. One problem is that most corporations no longer hire web *developers*, they hire site *designers*. The difference is that the former were at least marginally competent, and the latter are so completely incompetent, they make George W. look like a farking genius. Site *designers* are the people that produce Flash-only sites using site-building software tools (most major corporations), but I presume that flat-backing for their boss is their real job, since they can't build working web sites to save their life.
I have several machines and they all run Linux exclusively.
I'm a Flash developer, btw.
There are 13 million iPhones. iPhones don't support Flash. 13 million is larger than the difference between the reported number of network devices and Flash-enabled devices reported.
Thus, one of the assumptions above must be incorrect.
QED.
I'm a nature photographer.
I think it's quite a dangerous thing Adobe is doing here. With entire institutions now set up and devoted to prosecuting anti-trust cases, loudly proclaiming that you own a large percentage of any particular market is no longer such a smart move any more. It may only be a matter of time before other companies start to notice this and complain that Adobe is a monopoly in this market and anything else they do will get closely scrutinized thereafter.
I do hope it happens, in fact, since I personally dislike flash intensely for almost all of it's uses in the real world.
According to Adobe Device Central CS4
The only popular american devices not listed are Blackberries, iPhones and the XBOX360
The Wii is listed, the PS3 is listed, pretty much every Nokia and Sony Ericsson phone with a 240x320 screen is listed, most Japanese and Korean phones.
The RAZR has flash lite 2.1, the LG phones have Flash lite 2.0 or 2.1, The samsung phones have flash lite 2 or 2.1 except the i8510 which has flash lite 3. The Nokia (inc N95) phones have Flash lite 2.0 or 3.0 And Sony Ericsson's phones have Flash lite 2.0 or 3.0
The HTC phones (Windows Mobile devices) Have flash lite 2.0 as well.
All Windows PC's have flash, likewise all Mac's do as well. It's available on Linux (though may not be installed.)
Now consider that the blackberry and the iphone are smartphones, and the iPhone is only a recent phone. Few people are willing to pay money to get a smart phone, so there aren't that many people with these.
With Flashblock it is a discretionary thing.
bsdkitchen# cd /usr/ports/www/flashplugin
`/usr/ports/www/flashplugin: No such file or directory.
Hmm, seems net connected BSD users are max 1% of all connected.
The PC I installed it on Friday must have been the one to push it over the line.
... my guess is that flash penetration... ...since youtube...
Um, "flash penetration", don't you mean youporn?
(Which would also explain the percentage, since the Internet is for...)
There should be a less than sign before the 95%.
I forgot that the /. parser will remove the open and close html tag symbols.
I also did not include information about error which is involved in ones analysis of the appropriateness of a sample size. If you have a high confidence but a large error (greater than 5%), then you have to start wondering if the sample should have been larger.
Why would they make it complicated. It is better for them to show the browser is capable of playing ads numbers.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Just for your information
Android doesn't support flash as of yet
I should know, I'm posting from mine
The size of the population (as long as it is sufficiently large) should not dictate how big a sample size is taken. To test the water of the ocean or a swimming pool, the same size sample should suffice. The sample size being only .00000000000000000001% of the population makes no difference as long as the sample size is sufficiently large on an absolute scale.
yup. Flash memory chips..
My Nokia N95 phone has flash support, but it is generally horrible and doesn't work on about 9 out of 10 websites, including Nokia's own flash-based download pages... sigh. Prior to the firmware update that included flash, the phone has no flash support in the browser, so it would be shown the noflash version of pages. Now it has flash support, but if you disable it, it still identifies itself as flash-capable... meaning you cannot use websites.
Dear webmasters, please always include non-flash links -- EVEN ON THE FLASH PAGES -- for people who aren't using the latest & greatest version of flash.
My Vista64, my Windows Mobile, my Android cell phone, even by simple 3G handset Motorola Z8 browser (supposedly an opera clone) do not support Flash.
For Vista, there's a workaround, you can always fall back to 32-bit IE, but for those mobile devices I say Flash is a no-no.
Hell, even iPhone's Safari doesn't play flash.
I'd say they are ourtight liars. And must I also point out, I started disliking the format for quite some time.
Plain old sigh.
We receive over 10m uniques a day, and have more than 99% flash 9 adoption. I would say that our userbase is evident that the findings of 4600 people scales up pretty well.
I would guesstimate upper 90s for sure. Practically every windows machine has it. Many people probably installed it years ago when they went to a website, and Internet explorer popped up and said it needed to install. Most new computers come with it pre-installed. Most it groups no longer block it, and in fact, every place I have worked at over the past ten years has had flash in the image.
Macs I think have flash installed by default. I at least never remember installing flash on a mac, yet I know I use it.
Linux is a different matter, but everyone I know running Linux has installed it.
Short answer - I doubt it's 99% but I bet it's deffinately up there
A recent survey found that 99.998% of all automobile drivers say they have hit potholes in the road.
Most were unsure whether they found potholes in the road or Flash web pages more annoying.
OK, I know: it's off topic, it's flame-bait ... but I couldn't resist.
Believing something doesn't make it true. Not believing something doesn't make it false.
The statement says 99% of internet viewers, not systems, ergo in the first world economies this is almost certainly possible, anyone whose every opened a browser has probably seen flash, I couldn't be bothered looking up the percentage of the population totals the third world, but, just pointing out the actual context of the statement to the poster and the 270+ posters who also don't appear to have picked up this clever marketing spin
NoScript is the second most popular Firefox extension. Nobody know how many users block javascript because most analytic tools rely on it. OTOH if they used flash's built in self-detection I would show up as a false negative, because I do have flash but only allow it to run selectively.
As for Adobe's claim: patently false - most mobiles here in the UK can access the internet, but only the very latest ones have flash support, and then usually only on selected sites. And I would make an educated guess that the UK has a higher proportion of cutting-edge phones than most places in the world.
This may be true, but within a year or two a sizeable proportion of users will be accessing the web - most likely including your site - using phones. Many of these phones will not have full or any Flash support. In short: you can't rely on it, you can't even rely on javascript: you have to build a robust, HTML-only fallback.
Do they have any idea how many "internet viewers" in Asia use their cell phones/DSis/etc?
There is ZERO chance that 99% of of "internet viewers" have flash.
The marketing idiots are full of shit, as usual.
In most cases Flash only websites are the way to go
... if you don't want your site to be viewable on a phone.
Somewhat anecdotally, I developed a little something for London's Metropolitan Police that would've been a lot easier if their nearly 52,000 employees had access to Flash. Met systems don't use it; I'd speculate that most government systems here don't and won't.
http://www.collude.biz - Ignore this, it's for Project Honey Pot.
A good Dilbert strip covering this point. http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/2008-05-08/
I'm an instructional designer, and one thing that is deceiving about this 99% stat is this--even when a Windows box supposedly has Flash installed, depending on browser configuration, our Flash products often do not work without tons of user intervention. Usually it's IE security settings or something similar, but it's always SOMETHING in windows that requires our customers to run through a circuit of burning hoops just to display their training.
Having a robust mix of computer models in an organization only exacerbates the problem. Here at work, we have maybe five or six different Dell boxes in our dev network, and only two of them correctly display Flash files "out-of-the-box". The others all have their own unique "issue" for why they won't display Flash content.
It is so bad that the first lesson of each of our training packages is an html based help file that tells the student how to configure their Windows based computer to play Flash (based on common pitfalls of different browser and security settings).
I'm sorry, I either have JavaScript turned off or an old version of Adobe's Flash Player. I can't read your post.
I think the main problem many of you have with Flash is that non-coding dorks like me can make a very nice living creating content without having to have gone through four years of computer science classes. I think resentment is stupid, but I also think it is real. All the "real" developers I work with won't give me 5 minutes of their time when I need a tricky bit of ActionScript, because: a) I'm not a real developer, and b) ActionScript is not a real language...sigh.
Flash is *not* a W3C standard -> Flash is *not* part of the Web.
In no way does Flash match the definition of the Web from Tim Berners-Lee, which is information to *anyone*.
http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/
Anything calling itself a "website" that has flash inside should be charged with false claims.
Besides even on XP, flash sux (both the cpu and itself):
http://revolf.free.fr/img/why_I_banned_flash.png
http://revolf.free.fr/img/why_flash_sux_even_on_linux.png
it really possible that 99% penetration could have been reached? Including Linux users? Including users at work? Including brand-new systems?"
Flash came pre-installed on my Mac, and it appears to be installed by default in Ubuntu. I'm not sure about Vista, but I always have to install it when I set up Windows XP
OTOH, my iPhone doesn't handle Flash.
No, I will not work for your startup
...Thanks to Google Analytics. One of the many pieces of useful information GA tracks by default is site visitors' Flash capabilities (down to the minor version number). If you don't think Google is already tracking those numbers in aggregate form across all the sites they service with GA, you probably don't quite grasp the business Google is in.
Anecdotally, Adobe's 99% claim is broadly supported by the Google Analytics stats on the mid-sized corporate web site I maintain: of ~35,000 unique visitors this month, a little under 97% reported some version of Flash installed (and of that number, a total of 11 reported an open source Flash player).
SIERRA TANGO FOXTROT UNIFORM
Just checked the Google Analytics numbers on a site I'm responsible for (which doesn't use Flash for any significant functionality), and over the last year, from a sample size of 131,000 visitors, we had 97.9% Flash support.
The lack of flash and possibly javascript is only two of the differences between pc's and mobile units.
My pc has an 20 inch screen an the iphone screen is about 3.5 inches. Very few mobile units have screens much bigger than this.
Creating web pages that works on both a huge and a tiny screen is certainly possible. But I would argue that it is in most cases much better for all to make two versions of the site. One for the PC and one for mobile units.
I do not think this is going to change in the near future because people simply does not want to carry around mobile units with much larger screens.