Study on the use of Macromedia Flash

I Forewords

Copyright :
The present study is the exclusive property of the IDfr company.
Any reproduction, even partial, is strictly prohibited except with a written agreement of the IDfr company

Perimeter of the study :
The present study was carried out by the IDfr company thanks to the our Web analytics tool Wysistat. The data presented below were measured during 2 months (July & August 2004) thanks to our customers' Web sites (around 1,000 customers), that is to say a population of several million visitors. These net users are coming from all over the World.
A measure of evolution is allowed thanks to the similar study led during summer, 2003 by the company IDfr, the study which you can find on our Internet site:http://www.wysistat.biz

Macromedia Flash :
Macromedia Flash is a tool for creating and developping multimedia applications to offer to the owner of Web sites many possibilities of graphic creations and animations. You can download it on www.macromedia.com.
The version 7 of the player was launched in October, 2003. Macromedia 7 presents as main innovation the addition of a new engine of programming ActionScript 2.0, its programming is similar to Java.

Data available :
The purpose of the data presented below are not to make a classification or to give an opinion on the operating systems or the browsers quoted. Some navigators or some operating systems were not deferred on this study due to their weak utilisation ratio and due to our objective to preserve a maximum of clearness.

II Study

1.  Global data

In a global way, the almost totality of the Internet users have a Flash player (only 1,5 % do not have it). We notice that 94,9 % of the Internet users have the Flash player 6 or above, what illustrates the fact that an animation requiring the Flash player 6 forces 5,1 % to download a newer player.
In 10 months, the Flash player 7 was installed by more than 70 % of the Internet users, which is a consequent percentage. The evolution shows that the proportion of the Internet users having no Flash player does not vary much over one year. We notice that the Internet users using the versions lower than the 7th decrease, notably for the version 5.
The Internet users having last year the version 6 globally updated their Flash player.

		Sum	Evolution between 2003 and 2004
No Flash player		1.5 %	-0.1 pt
Flash PlayerVersion	3	0.15 %	-0.35 pt
	4	0.45 %	-0.95 pt
	5	3.0 %	-6.0 pt
	6	23.7 %	-63.8 pt
	7	71.2 %	+71.2 pt

fig 1 : Global Data

2. Crossing per Operating System

The equipment penetration rate by operating system shows that the Internet users  using Ms Windows are more equipped than the other ones. The Mac users are moving slowly to the Flash player 7 whereas the Linux/Unix users seem to stick with Flash 6. 

		Windows	Mac	Linux/Unix
No Flash Player		1.5 % (=)	1.2 % (-2.5)	15.6 % (+10.2)
Flash Player Version	3	0.1 % (-0.4)	0.2 % (-0.4)	-
	4	0.2 % (-0.8)	5.5 % (-7.2)	2.7 % (-9.8)
	5	3.0 % (-5.9)	2.1 % (-5.5)	8.1 % (-22.6)
	6	23.5 % (-64.6)	27.1 % (-48.3)	52.8 % (+1.4)
	7	71.7 % (+71.7)	63.9 % (+63.9)	20.8 % (+20.8)

fig 2 : Flash player crossed per Operating System

3. Crossing per browser 

The crossing per type of browsers shows that the users of Internet Explorer are more to have installed Flash player 7. On the other hand, in 2003, the users of Netscape  reacted slower to get a Flash player while now, the 3 groups of navigators have a Flash player 6   almost equal:
- Flash 6 or more for IE: 95,0 %
- Flash 6 or more for Netscape: 94,6 %
- Flash 6 or more for Opera: 96,7 %

		IE	Netscape - Mozilla	Opera
No Flash Player		1.5 % (-0.1)	0.1 % (-0.2)	1.0 % (+0.2)
Flash Player Version	3	0.1 % (-0.3)	0.7 % (-3.6)	- %
	4	0.4 % (-0.7)	1.9 % (-10.9)	0.1 % (-0.3)
	5	3.0 % (-5.7)	2.7 % (-12.9)	2.2 % (-7.0)
	6	23.3 % (-64.9)	29.0 % (-38.0)	50.3 % (-39.3)
	7	71.7 % (+71.7)	65.6 % (+63.9)	46.4 % (+46.4)

fig 3 : Crossing per browser

 III Conclusion :

We present here the general conclusions drawn by this study, but everybody can draw his own conclusions using the previously mentioned figures.