The answer is easy—to survive. It blows my mind how many projects are launched with Flash player 6 or 7 as the targeted build. A few years ago, in order to help people improve their website’s awesomeness, I used to point people to a white paper by Emmy Huang of Adobe that did a great job of explaining how fast the adoption rate of a new Flash player is.

source: Adobe.com

Since then, this data has rapidly become outdated, as adoption rates are so much faster now. Below is a picture taken from a conference entitled MAX Japan.

source: Ted Patrick

After the launch of a new player it appears to take less than six months for the old player to completely vanish from the Internet. From personal experience, I have noticed there are always a very small percentage of computers, typically locked down behind corporate firewalls, which are forced into still using Flash player 5. However, these computers are usually stripped down of any graphic processing software, begging the question whether they are even a good target audience for Flash content in the first place.

So, when it comes to deciding what Flash player to use, it all depends on first and foremost your target audience. Common logic will tell us people that are not heavy computer users are usually at the end of the adoption tail. And, those that are very computer literate will adopt the second they come to a page that uses the new Flash player. Keep in mind, this is within a six-month lifespan so, at most, you should only have to worry about three different players at a time.

If you do not keep up to date on what the Flash player’s features are, picking the player solely based on your target audience could lead to problems. This is why it’s important to first establish what you want Flash to do for your project when selecting a player. This should be an open conversation with a Flash developer that weighs your target audience and what you want your content to do. These conversations could last two minutes or over the span of days depending on how large the scale of your project.

In addition, there are almost always advantages in going with a newer Flash player. As competition gets fierce in the web world, you want your video and animation to be as fast and seamless as possible. It’s easy to forget, but web technology can change how efficient and fast it is over night. And the Flash player is no exception. Every version gets faster and faster and is able to support more. YouTube is a perfect example of a site that capitalized on one of Flash’s brand new features. Right when Flash supported a video codec that could compete with the quality of such players like QuickTime or Windows Media Player and allow under-the-hood programming in 2005, YouTube was one of the first to adopt it in a bold way…and the rest is history.