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Flash Power Tools: Flash Switcher for Firefox

By: Joseph Balderson

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Out there in the Flash design and development world, there are many tools available to assist in creating projects. These are "power tools" that supercharge the task of designing, coding, compiling, testing and documenting, allowing you to save time and present ideas much more effectively. Some have been around for a few years, and some are pretty new. This series highlights some of the open source tools and techniques which have made my life as a Flash developer much more effective.

This article covers a utility which I consider to be paramount to any Flash developer's toolkit: the Flash Switcher extension for Firefox. (Windows only)

Image 1: The Flash Switcher Firefox extension

The Pain of Switching

Up until very recently, the task of testing a project on different Flash Player versions was a pain. You could keep a repertoire of player plugin installers on hand, and manually re-install the version you need to test on, but if you wanted to test in several different versions, several times over the course of a day's development, debugging and QA would slow to a crawl. Prompting many developers to skip the process entirely, sometimes to the detriment of project integrity.

You could also keep several different browser versions installed, each with their own version of the Flash Player, but what if you wanted to use a specific browser but with a different Flash player version? Your carefully arranged lineup of browser-player combinations would constantly need readjustment, wasting more time.

Why would you need to test a project on several different versions of the Flash Player? Here are but a few reasons:

• you need to test whether Express Install is functioning correctly;
• you need to test whether your custom Flash player detection functions correctly;
• you need to switch to a debugger version of the player to do live debugging of the SWF;
• your SWF is exported for a lower player version, but may have enhanced functionality if the user is running the SWF in a higher player version that can handle the upgraded capabilities.

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Keywords
flash, flash player, plugin, firefox, plugin switcher, flash switcher, dll, extension, powertools, tools