[thelist] Flash 5 installation hell

[John Dowdell]

At 1:51 PM 10/6/0, Mike Migurski wrote:
>has anyone here dealt with deploying flash 5 content? We have site we're
>deploying soon that makes use of 5's new scripting architecture, and we're
>trying to make the upgrade as painless as possible for our users. Using
>the Flash 5 deployment kit, including personal advice from its author,
>we're still running into massive difficulties get installation to work on
>PC's - with netscape we've had to restart windows, and ran into issues
>with the browser not recognizing the plugin, and IE users have experienced
>a range of problems from system crashes to interrupted downloads. Can
>anyone offer any advice on the subject? Our mac tests have gone smoothly.

I'm not sure what the problem is... sounds like "life is hell", but...?

Some browsers definitely need a restart. Although Netscape has a
theoretical plugin-refresh method, it's more stable to actually shut down
the browser before installing things into it.

IE/Win won't always need a restart, but if you've got an ActiveX Control in
use then you can't replace it while it's running, and so would need to
restart the machine in that case.

If something isn't downloading fully, then that seems like it would be a
separate class of issues.

I'm not sure whether any of this is what you're seeing though...?

For "How can I make sure they're using the Macromedia Flash Player 5?" then
I'd usually have some Flash scripting that checks the "version" property,
jumping to the main HTML page if it's 5+. With any failure they'd stay at
your "you need a player" page.

jd






John Dowdell, Macromedia Tech Support, San Francisco CA US
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