Joeflash’s Enigmacopaedia

Lately Adobe and Flash have taken a lot of heat over the real and perceived instabilities of the Flash Player. Depending on who you talk to, these are due to the Flash Player itself, or the fault of poorly developed applications. But how would Adobe know the difference, other than through us developers painstakingly filing Flash Player bugs (and bugging Adobe to fix ‘em)?

Kevin Lynch recently discussed Adobe’s views and improvements in bug reporting and Flash Player performance. Mike Chambers chimed in to confirm these changes to the Adobe Bug system. And just today, Tinic Uro, Flash Player engineer from whom we have not heard from in over a year and whose articles are amongst my most prized links, treated us with an article on Apple Core Animation vis Flash Player performance.

And with the inclusion of the much anticipated (and debated) Global Error Exception Handling (FP-444) in Flash Player 10.1, Adobe has shown that the community is being heard (eventually).

This is a good first (and necessary !!!) step, but what the Flash Player needs is better automatic crash and exception error reporting.

My colleague Matt Fabb and I have put together three feature requests that I believe hold the key to making the Flash Player a much more robust development platform.

1. In the right-click context menu include a link to the player’s bug system
2. Automatic crash reporting built into all versions of the Flash Player
3. Flash Player API hook to allow for custom automatic exception error reporting

(PS: Vote for these FRs!!)

The first allows people to submit a bug to Adobe’s (now open) Bug Reporting system, which Matt has eloquently described on his blog.

The second feature request would have a second process “monitor” the health of the Flash Player and send an automatic crash report to Adobe if and when the player process crashes through a fatal exception (which most of the time also takes down the browser). This will give Adobe invaluable insight as to why so many users bitch about claim that the Flash Player is unstable on certain OS/browser configurations, without Adobe relying solely on an army of QA engineers.

The last feature request would allow for an addition to the global exception API (as requested in FP-444 and detailed in the livedocs), to allow developers to specify a server to automatically send uncaught exception data, in the eventuality that the application itself crashes, which would prevent it from otherwise being able to send such a report.

Vote for these three feature requests, and get a glimpse of what the future may hold.