Detecting if Flash in installed, enabled, & browser?

Report · Aug 27, 2017

We're a vendor of educational software with millions of uses monthly in schools and by home users. Recently, the browsers seemed to change from having to not only install Flash but to have to enable it for specific websites. While each browser is slightly different (Chrome, Safari, Edge/IE, Firefox), they all seem to have moved to slight variations of this paradigm.

Does anyone have a great utility that will:

1. Detect if Flash is both installed and enabled for this website

2. If Flash is not both installed and enabled, will provide detailed directions to the user of exactly what they should do to install or enable for their browser?

It seems silly for us each to write this. Does it already exist somewhere? Has Adobe provided it?
Or are we on our own?

Report · Aug 27, 2017

Hi,

For enterprise users, we have http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/masterversion/masterversion.xml file which you can use in your script to check if you are on the latest version of Flash Player.

Thanks!

Report · Aug 28, 2017

Thanks. This looks to be one piece of the puzzle that I'm trying to build. It "checks to see if you are on the latest version of Flash Player" which is good.

But does it check if it is enabled for the target website? That's the next piece.

The third piece would be to have the info: what problem (installed, updated, enabled) has to be done and what browser ideally with the exact directions for solving the problem.

And for tablets and other devices/browsers where Flash cannot be run, an opportunity for us to insert our own message which in some cases is:

- to use the app with a direct link to it

- to use a flash browser like puffin with a direct link to it

Also, built in statistics would be nice. Anybody?