Question

I’m developing an ASP.NET website that will need to support non-flash users.

In case the user’s browser doesn’t support Flash, or they have Flash disabled, I’d like to download a large splash image to the browser.

However I don’t want to waste bandwidth downloading it if the Flash does render properly.

So is it possible to test, from the server-side using .NET code, whether the browser supports flash? I looked through the ‘Request.Browser’ object, but couldn’t find anything relevant to Flash.

Answer 1

You might try using some server var:

‘HTTP_ACCEPT’
against
‘application/x-shockwave-flash’

Not sure about .NET but it works most of the time in php. This does not work in Safari but for what you’re doing that should be fine. You’ll be saving yourself some bandwidth 95% of the time. PHP example(not .NET but you get the idea):

if (strstr($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT'], 'application/x-shockwave-flash')){
    $hasFlash = true;
}