Certain enterprises block ActiveX content at the firewall, thereby either knowingly or unknowingly blocking the installation of the Flash player. For at least two of our clients, this has been reason enough to go with HTML over Flash.

Has anyone else encountered this problem? Are there any statistics out there on the number of enterprises that implement such a policy? What evidence (if any) is there to counter the claim that this is widespread in enterprises? (A part of my does wonder if perhaps certain enterprises here in the UK are not more technologically conservative than those in other countries when it comes to these things.)

Perhaps the most important piece of statistic is the 93.5% penetration rate of the Flash 6 player but this statistic is at best naive and at worst willfully misleading. It represents the total penetration rate of all Flash 6 player *subversions*. There is no guarantee that code compiled for one Flash 6 player subversion will run successfully on another. In fact, as I have stated many times before, the whole concept of subversions is misleading and every update to the Flash player should be regarded as a new version (at least insofar as the granularity of the penetration statistics are concerned.)

I, for one, am much more interested in the penetration rate for the Flash 6r65 player and above and would love to see some statistics on enterprises that block ActiveX content (such stats may exists elsewhere as Flash is not the only plug-in to be affected by such policies.) If you have any such information, feel free to add a link to the comments!

The Statistics on enterprises that block ActiveX content (and thus Flash) article by Aral Balkan, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 UK: England License.