Flash Detection on IE w/o relying on VBScript

Here's the old way of trying to declare variables inside VBScript and passing those values to Javascript.

<script language="javascript">
document.write('<script language=VBScript\> \n');
document.write('on error resume next \n');
document.write('hasFlash = (IsObject(CreateObject("ShockwaveFlash.ShockwaveFlash.4"))) \n');
document.write('</script\> \n');
</script>

With the old way, there tend to be errors that state that one can't have script tags within a block of script. It is cumbersome, and has never worked for me.

Here's a different way using a javascript try/catch, and the instantiation (or failure) of ActiveXObject's take on flash.

<script language="javascript">

if(navigator.appName.indexOf("Netscape")==-1){
	var flashObj;
	try{
/* attempt to create an instance of the flash object, if it is capable of being created, 
it can be treated as a boolean TRUE */
	flashObj = new ActiveXObject("ShockwaveFlash.ShockwaveFlash.5")
//in other words TRUE
	}
	catch(error){
	flashObj = false
	}
	if(flashObj){
	alert("do the flash stuff");
	}else{
	alert("do something else");
	}
}
</script>

Try this out by changing the 5 to a 6 for the Flash version. Happy version checking!

If you find that this doesn't work for different platforms, e-mail me at brotherchaos75@yahoo.com.