Gambling Guide

This section is dedicated to casino software and technology, including software reviews, browser and OS compatibility discussions, and other technology issues.

Flash Casinos and Firefox Browser

Posted by: SharpGambler on Fri, 21 September 2007 09:00:01 (404 Reads)

Firefox users have a lot of problems to find flash casinos that work correctly on this browser. This is a real issue found on every Microgaming casino. Although Windows users can switch from Firefox to internet explorer, Mac and Linux users have to go into more creative actions.

Flash technology is a real good thing, mostly because it does not rely on operating system or browser. Every user can view flash content without having to worry about the operating system and browser they are using. At the same time, flash technology allows to interact with a system right on your browser without any need to download and install software on your computer. This should be the case for the no download version of online casinos.

A no download flash casino should serve two main purposes: allow every potential player to play right on the browser without any need to download and install software, and to be cross-platform compatible. But are they really fulfilling these two purposes?

The first purpose is widely attained by every online casino. This is because of the nature of the flash technology. There is no need to install software, it is fast to start interacting with it, and it does not require any tedious download wait. There is nothing to point here. Regarding the second purpose there is something important to add here. Is flash really cross-platform compatible? Well, it is, but there is more than flash attached to flash casinos. And that makes it unusable under certain circumstances. In fact it is usable if you run Internet Explorer, but it is not on other browsers. This is a major problem because not all people uses Internet Explorer, and no one uses it on Linux or Mac OSX. It means that flash casinos are only playable on Windows machines running Internet Explorer. The fast growing Firefox browser will not work with most flash casinos.

If you use Windows OS and Internet Explorer you may think that this article does not add anything to you. In fact it doesn’t. You don’t have these problems when playing a flash casino. But if you don’t use a Windows OS with Internet Explorer then this problem is something that gives you some headaches.

The main reason for all this mess on flash playability has a name: ActiveX technology. The main flash program used on flash casinos uses another technology called ActiveX. ActiveX is a Microsoft technology used for developing reusable object oriented software components. I don’t want to discuss here what this is exactly. I just want you to understand that this technology is attached on most flash casinos, and it is not supported on most browsers. It means that you won’t be able to play flash casinos if you don’t use Internet Explorer (or IE-based browsers), so Firefox users, Linux users, and Mac OSX users, are amongst a large group that have problems with it.

Not all flash casinos have this problem attached but one of the most important casino software providers – Microgaming – has this issue, which constitutes a major blow for a large number of potential players.

To better understand the impact of the problem, let’s take a look into some summary stats:

• October 2004 – 91%
• March 2005 – 90%
• October 2005 – 87%
• March 2006 – 90%
• October 2006 – 87%
• March 2007 – 84%
• August 2007 – 72%

The above data is for Internet Explorer usage and obtained from TheCounter.com.

Although this data may vary a little regarding the source we use, there is a common point regardless of what source we use to collect the data – Internet Explorer is losing influence. In fact, a market share that was above 90% in 2004 is now below 80%. This gives more than 20% Internet users with non-IE browsers that most likely will have problems to play flash casinos.

These numbers should worry non-cross-platform compatible flash casinos, and they should spend some time to solve this issue. From a non-confirmed information I have, Microgaming is working on this. I hope this is true. In the meantime, if you are using Windows, the best option available to play a flash casino is to use Internet Explorer for that particular need. If you use Mac OSX I think you may be interested in reading two articles I wrote about some potential solutions to run online casinos under that OS. The solutions given on that article may also work under Linux. You can find the articles on the following links:
Playing An Online Casino On Mac OSx
Online Casinos For Mac OSx

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