Detecting adobe flash version on IE7 - vista

Question

It appears I'm not able to detect the installed version of flash on Vista/IE7.

The following code fails:

var x = new ActiveXObject('ShockwaveFlash.ShockwaveFlash');

The error I'm getting is:

automation server cannot create object

Looking at the Adobe Flash Detection Kit (from adobe), it looks like that's failing as well. I only have 1 vista machine to test with, so I'm curious:

• Are there ways around the problem
• Does this problem occur for everyone?

I have successfully tested this on IE6 and IE7 on Windows XP.

Answer 1

There are great examples on how to retrieve the version of currently installed Flash version. All of the similar examples are using actionscript (v2+), they just assemble information about the flash version and show it to the user.

Answer 2

Looks like swfobject - http://code.google.com/p/swfobject/ - is an option that may actually work.

"It is the successor of SWFObject 1.5, UFO, and the Adobe Flash Player Detection Kit." - http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/swfobject.html

Code would look something like this (haven't tested on a machine that doesn't have Flash installed):

<script type="text/javascript" src="/Scripts/swfobject/swfobject.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
$(window).load(function() {
    try {
        var flashPlayer = swfobject.getFlashPlayerVersion();
        var flashVersion = flashPlayer.major + "." + flashPlayer.minor + "." + flashPlayer.release;
    } catch (ex) {
    }
});
</script>