Emmy Huang, product manager for Flash Player, has posted a blog entry that details the number of daily downloads and installs of Flash Player. As expected, the numbers are really, really big. "In July 2008, successful downloads averaged about 33 million per day, and successful installs averaged around 18 million per day."

The latest number from Microsoft (that they give publicly) for Silverlight downloads is from April of this year, when they were averaging 1.5 million per day.

Its probably worthwhile to look at the numbers for the Olympics recently and compare those to the number of installs for Silverlight. According to ZDNet, on day 3 of the opening weekend 3.42 million streams were watched online at NBC Olympics. Assuming that person viewed just two streams, that's about 1.7 million users - or about the number of installs that Microsoft could expect in 2 days (if they're completion rate is the same as Adobe's - about 54%, and assuming that every person watching didn't have the runtime installed.) And the same number that Adobe receives in 2 or 3 hours.

When it was first announced that NBC would be using Silverlight for the Olympics, many people thought this would be a great catalyst for distribution of the runtime. I had different thoughts at the time, and I think they've proven to be true.

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.

Adobe has updated the penetration statistics for Flash Player. Flash Player 9, which is required for Flex 2 applications, is currently installed on over 90% of Internet connected computers in mature markets (defined as Europe, Japan, the US and Canada). In emerging markets its at 89.4%.

What's this mean for RIA developers like yourself? Historically development for Flash has taken off when the Flash Player has reached 80% penetration - compare when YouTube took off with the release of Flash Player 8. At 90% for Flash Player 9, most end developers are comfortable developing applications in Flex 2, knowing that 90% of Internet connected desktops can access the application.

Adobe has already announced that Flex 3 applications will run in Flash Player 9. Flex 3 applications will not required Flash Player 10.

(Via Ryan Stewart)