Flash Player Settings: Flash and Silverlight Comparison

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Oct 29

Flash Player Settings: Flash and Silverlight Comparison

Flash, Silverlight/WPFe, Adobe Add comments

One of the little pet peeves I seem to share with other Flashers is the frankenstein-like html/flash settings manager pages that you have to access via Adobe’s site. This is the thing you see when you right click a Flash movie and choose “Settings” -> “Advanced". It allows you to trust certain locations on your hard drive, delete “Flash cookies” (LSOs) , auto-check for player updates and other tasks.

The thing is this thing really looks and feels old now (it’s an FP6 file and it shows), it seems strange I have to be online and visit a site to delete files the Flash Player creates on my hard drive… if it’s a chore for a Flash dev, what’s the chance someone else can use it, particularly if people are storing sensitive info in there (bad devs!). I just got pinged a link to a Silverlight site and as I had to update to 2.0.something so I thought I’d check out the new settings panel (below, click to view full size):

I think you’ll agree much better all round. Very clear, and more importantly I don’t have to browse to another website to use it. Adobe, can we see an updated version of the settings panel for Flash Player some time soon? Perhaps a column to sort by usage/date too so you can quickly delete older LSOs. Perhaps there’s a really good reason for it and I’m just missing the obvious.

8 comments

§ paddy said on : 29/10/08 @ 16:35
This is under the settings manager:

"Note: The Settings Manager that you see above is not an image; it is the actual Settings Manager...."

You've got to wonder if someting is wrong when a note like that is necessary ;)
§ Iain said on : 29/10/08 @ 17:12
Dude, you're dead right. If you can set webcam settings etc from the context menu, why not these settings too?
§ John Dowdell said on : 29/10/08 @ 19:05
Understood. There's a lot of internal pressure to update this UI as well. But it didn't make it into the Astro cycle. Still an action item for us.

The unusual "interface on the web, data stored locally" approach was driven mostly by the diverse dimensions of SWF on the web today... the cookie/cam/etc controls need to be available even for a postage-stamp-sized SWF.

If you're at MAX, please do bring this need up during face-to-face conversations. I'll forward the link to Richard's essay to others within Adobe as well.

jd/adobe
§ Richard Leggett® said on : 29/10/08 @ 19:39
Thanks JD, I had considered the SWF dimensions (same for Express Install of course), and I imagine it's quite a lot more work to create system native panels but I'm glad it's on the roadmap.
§ Phillip Kerman said on : 01/11/08 @ 06:24
Totally... the settings manager looks like a (bad) toy. I cringe every time I have to walk a customer through it. My favorite is when it sometimes hits the 15 second timeout. I mean, really. We can talk about aesthetics all day long, but making something that fails to actually work? I suspect the reason it didn't "make it into the astro cycle" is because no one wants to touch it.
§ Ian Fuller said on : 03/11/08 @ 02:30
Yes the settings manager is fairly awful - but one of the reasons your diverted to another (badly written) page might be to reduce the size (and more easily allow for updates) of the flash player itself?
§ Daniel Wood said on : 20/11/08 @ 15:33
I'm currently working on a site that uses LSOs and I have to clear them constantly. I'm just opening up the settings panel and changing the storage size to 0kb. Next time you load the site it asks you if you want to store them again. Problem solved.
§ chall3ng3r said on : 12/12/08 @ 10:56
Hi,

I posted about this sometime ago on my blog also. The other thing to notice is you cannot see what exact version of Flash Player you have.

You must open the About link through right-click, and on Adobe's website you can see full version number. While Silverlight shows everything right from righ-click pop-up dialog.

// chall3ng3r //