I was evaluating some new content for the church web site this morning and I got to wondering what the ubiquity of Flash Player 9 was for the population that accesses our site. Thanks to Google Analytics I was able to quickly look at the information. I was pleasantly shocked by what I found:
Flash Player 9: 91.20%
Flash Player 8: 5.67%
Flash Player 7: 2.20%
No Flash: 0.93%
If you look at the chart below you'll note that the blue is FP9 and the tiny green sliver is no FP installed.
That's right, over 90% of our web using population has FP9 installed. This pretty well eliminates any concern I have about using FP9 specific content (that content might even drive the other 7% to upgrade).
So why did this surprise me? Schweitzer is a multigenerational church. In our case the population is pretty evenly spread among retirees, middle-aged, young adults, and children/youth. I know many of the older folks in the church use our web site and assumed there might be a bit of lag in adoption. When we revised the site last winter FP8 was the overwhelming winner. It's even more interesting that there are no really old versions of Flash Player, Player 7 is the oldest version in our population. What does this mean? Primarily it means that as we build our media player this fall we can target FP9 specific features and know there won't be a huge uproar.
