Flash Player, A Trojan Horse

I was just going over these articles today on the MXNA:

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20050623.html

http://www.flashinsider.com/2005/06/24/i-cringlely-looks-at-the-future-of-flash/

which talks about the usual great advantages of owning the Flash Player, and John Dowdell's response:

http://www.markme.com/jd/archives/007956.cfm

Now in a way I would have to say that the first article is not as far off as it may seem. The Flash Player actually is a serious Trojan Horse and that can be leveraged in a big way in the future.

John states that it is Flash Player features that make it great and that is true, but there is a hidden little ability in the Flash Player since Flash Player 6 that not alot of people know about. That feature is:

var foo = new System.Product("AdobeVoipClient");
foo.download();

This feature is used to pull in Macromedia Central, Central Applications, and The Macromedia Breeze Player to the desktop. This feature is potentially a "Trojan Horse" if you will.

The original Blogger's argument actually has more legs to stand on than it seems. I am sure Acrobat and other technologies can easily pull down other applications or content, but the Flash Player is different.

Being a web player with a massive install base it means that applications can easily be pulled down, with little or no interuption and annoyance to the end user. Getting that content is as easy as having the code above execute in a swf file. The Flash Player also has an auto-update mechanism that is beautifully designed. Very unintrusive. These in combination create a recipie for instant ubiquity if the owners of the Flash Player were to leverage it for this purpose.

I would seem to think that Adobe would be interested in this. For example, it is likely that Acrobat could be pulled in through this mechanism in the future, or potentially any other web player that adobe comes up with.

Think of Adobe Atmosphere. What better way to get a brand new web player out, than proxying it's launch through the Flash Player. The Flash Player could recieve the call for content, download the needed player and run the content. Anytime after that the Flash Player could again, recieve the request and launch the content direct.

So in final, many people are not aware of this Flash Player feature, and Trojan Horse it actually is.