Identifying the two Shockwave Plugins

Being two plugins, identifying Flash and Director can be a confusing task. Basically there are two players:

• Shockwave Director Player, plays Director files.
• Shockwave Flash Player, plays Flash files.

Adding to the confusion, Shockwave Director has had several link-buttons with differing names.

Commonly, "Shockwave" refers to Director. Still, the above button has also been used for Flash.

Looking much like the Director button, the above Shockwave Flash button was more confusing than helpful.

Today, is added the "Get Flash" button. With the new Flash logo, you finally know what you are downloading.

Tip:

An easy way to identify whether you are looking at Flash or Director content on the web is to rightclick (on a Mac you control/click) the content with the mouse button:

The above menu appears if you are looking at Flash content. If you are looking at Director content, no menu appears upon rightclick.

So the bottomline is, Shockwave refers to content created in Director , whilst Flash refers to content created in Flash .

That's all well and good for browser users to know, but what a developer wants to know is: "Which should I use to create my site with, Director or Flash?"