Adobe has published statistics on the penetration of Flash Player 9 as of June 2007. The numbers look pretty good – over 90 percent of the users in mature markets have it already installed on their computers. While the installation process of the player was always very simple (at least this is what I’ve been told  by one trucker from Alabama), only 10 percents of the population have not upgraded the player yet.  Ninety percent is a very impressive number.  For enterprise applications it’s a done deal – everyone  has it.  For the consumer facing applications it need to squeeze into at least another five percents of the potential customer.  But even Microsoft , let alone  any other software company, can only dream of having any of their software to be installed on 90% of the world’s computers in just one year.

90% is not a 100% and not even 98% that Flash Player 8 already enjoys. Since the penetration speed  looks pretty similar for the version 8 and 9 of the player, it’s safe to assume that Flash Player 9 will reach its 98% mark in the Summer of 2008.

Flash Player 9 is a virtual machine available on all major platforms and browsers. It’s as small as 1.2MB. Actually, it contains two VMs – one for the older applications written in ActionScript 2 for Flash Player 8, and the other one runs applications that are based on ActionScript 3. You can even run applications that consist of modules that run in the old and new VMs. When the compiled byte code arrives to Flash Player 9, it runs it through the Just-in-Time compiler, which grinds it into machine code.

Early next year Adobe will release Flex 3, and the good news is that it won’t require Flash Player upgrade, so you do not have to worry of compatibility issues of the client’s portion of your Flex 2 applications.

When someone will tell you, “We prefer developing our applications in JavaScript because it exists on every machine”, just simply say, “So?”