Flash Differences Between Adobe AIR And Internet Explorer

Question

We have developed an application front end in Flash. Now we are allowing access either from a browser or an Adobe AIR application. We point to the URL of our web server and download swf components and data via a NetConnection. We are seeing differences in the communication behavior of our web application with the Adobe AIR container verses Internet Explorer. There are some communication drops between the Adobe AIR container in our requests back to the web server for requests that take a longer time. Internet Explorer seems to be much more tolerant and handles much better.

It is not an issue simply with the connection reliability because the same behaviors can be observed by setting and holding a breakpoint on the requests for data from the web server.

So, same code but different behaviors when flash runs in Adobe Air. We have made sure both are using the same version of the flash dll.

As I missing some configuration of the Adobe AIR container that changes default behaviors?

Answer 1

You can take it as a given that AIR runtime and Flash Plugin are independent, do not run anything shared, and so on. Moreover, Flash ActiveX component and Flash Plugin for Mozilla FireFox and Flash Plugin for Chrome are different builds. Furthermore, you cannot be sure about configuration on a random client PC.

I advise you to stop using NetConnection (which is intended for message interchange and streaming video/audio) and load everything via standard Loader and URLLoader classes. Even if your server breaks connections now and then, it's easy to wrap those classes with failsafe retry functionality.