So we've been having this debate about Java vs Flash for online video applications. It is clear that Java is a much better platform than Flash for what we want to do if for no other reason than because we need access to the video stream to synchronize it with the audio for multi-point video conferencing. The problem is one of installed base of Flash vs Java and the willingness or ability of end users to install the Java Virtual Machine (or JRE).
So we started by testing the web browsers of our users. It probably isn't a surprise, but nearly 100% of our users have flash (98%+).
On the Java side, in the course of 7 days, we had 65k unique visitors to our test page with the following results:
42% no java
53% w/ Java 1.4 or greater
<2% 1.4 or earlier
June 15, 2008.
If you have data about trends for the Java installed base, please let me know.
-tj
