What’s happening and why?
Most VizExplorer products currently leverage Adobe’s FlashPlayer® to deliver a content-rich experience through your web browser. Adobe has chosen to end its support of FlashPlayer at the end of 2020 and Microsoft will be removing it from all browsers via a Windows Update at the same time. This means that, after 2020, you will no longer be able to access your VizExplorer products in the browser in their current form.
In order to continue providing a rich and consistent experience, Viz has chosen to leverage the technology through Adobe AIR. AIR will deliver your same content via a desktop application in its v2019.4 release. Through the end of 2020 and via the v2019.4 release, you will have the option of using the VizExplorer desktop application or the browser application to access your VizExplorer products.
What is Adobe® AIR®?
Adobe AIR is a cross-operating-system runtime that lets developers combine HTML, JavaScript, Adobe Flash® and Flex technologies, and ActionScript® to deploy rich Internet applications (RIAs) on a broad range of devices including desktop computers and smartphones.
How does Adobe AIR compare with FlashPlayer?
Adobe AIR is a superset of FlashPlayer and incorporates technologies originally developed in FlashPlayer to deliver internet rich content via a desktop application, thus eliminating the need to use a browser to experience the same content.
How will Viz leverage Adobe AIR?
Our engineering team will leverage the Adobe AIR technology to package our existing code in a manner that can be delivered via a desktop application without a dependency on FlashPlayer.
What does this mean?
- Inclusion of a Desktop Application in v2019.4: Your upgrade to v2019.4 will include access to a desktop application that you can use to experience VizExplorer software that is currently accessed via your web browser. You will still be able to access these products through the browser-based application until FlashPlayer is no longer accessible to your browser. Microsoft has announced the global removal of Flash from all browsers via a Windows update to occur at the end of 2020.
Dependencies for Desktop Application
VizExplorer server on v2019.4: While the desktop application can connect to any VizExplorer server, it is intended to work with v2019.4 of VizProcessor (BE). Upgrade to v2019.4 will include a BE upgrade. The desktop application may suffer from unintended bugs or performance characteristics if it is run on older versions of VizProcessor.
More
1 Components not affected = hostVizMobile, techVizMobile, Slot Recommendation Engine, the new PostForma feature of campaignViz (rolled out in v2019.3)
2 Your machine must meet the recommended specifications for hardware and software to experience this potential performance improvement