Flash Player is an extremely popular plugin for web browsers, that's obvious. What I find amazing about it isn't that its on nearly every computer that connects to the Internet, but that it gets updated so quickly. Recent stats show that about 80% of users update to the latest version of the Flash Player within 6 months of release. Its that reason that Flash is such a compelling platform to develop on, and why Flex is really taking off.

How does that compare to other technologies? Well, a recent survey has found that 40% of people aren't using the latest version of their web browser. More at Google, and the official study paper. That's a lot of people - more than 600 million of them. Some are running the latest main version, but without the security updates, and others are running older versions of the browser. (For eg. 92.2% of Firefox users were using Firefox 2, though Firefox 3 is available.) Updated by Mike: I misread the Google blog post referenced above.

How does this affect you? Well, with Flash Player, you can be pretty sure that 80% of people will be using the latest version within 6 months of release. As a developer, that means you can use all the newest features right away, without having to wait for users to update. That's very different than if you're developing apps in the browser.

In the past day, both Google and Yahoo have launched new browser plugins that enhance the functionality of the browser. Google in fact has two plugins - Gears (renamed from Google Gears), and a new plugin for Google Earth. Yahoo launched a new plugin called Yahoo BrowserPlus, which will one day allow developers to enhance the functionality of browser based applications by supporting things like drag and drop, desktop notifications etc.. BrowserPlus has a list of plugins or services that it currently enables.

While these companies certainly have the right intentions of improving the user experience, I see end users being the real losers here. The great thing about the web is that when you go to a webpage, you can view the content on it immediately. Remember how frustrating it was when Microsoft introduced HTML specific tags to IE? The same thing is happening again, except this time with plugins from various companies. Want to use this offline application from Google? Need to install the Gears plugin. Want to drag and drop a photo to Flickr? You need the Yahoo plugin. Want to see this 3D map? You need the Google Earth plugin, and you need to be on Windows.

I appreciate the intent of these companies that want to improve the user experience, but forcing users to install new pieces of software is not making things better. Its switching one problem (user experience) for another (installing and managing plugins).