Chrome, FlashDevelop, Etc.

Well, like everybody else in the Geek Zone, I'm trying out Google Chrome. It's pretty cool, and way closer to a browser that I would use than Safari. Safari is missing just about everything I need as far as mousing around is concerned. But anyway, here's the thing: I'm doing almost all my front-end work these days in Adobe Flash. Recently a client asked me to work in Flash 8 (i.e., AS2) and I've been doing a ton of stuff in AS3 with Adobe Flex, so of course I wanted to know how Google Chrome does with Adobe Flash and Adobe Flex 3 (yes, I write for engine optimization). And the answer is, quickly: as soon as I started Chrome up, it already had Flash 9.024 loaded. Now I'm not sure if it gets that from my Firefox install, but in any case Chrome is Flash friendly.

Of course I'll need deeper testing to know if Adobe Flash has performance problems with Google Chrome, but worse than the kinds of memory leaks I experience in Firefox, you ain't seen anything yet. Hmmm... memory leaks. Memory leaks... I wonder if it's my code? I wonder if there's a memory profiler for Flash apps...

One other thing while I'm here: the most amazing discovery of my foray into AS2 has been FlashDevelop. What an amazing open source IDE for ActionScript (http://www.flashdevelop.org)! And why is it so good? Because it's written in Adobe AIR, perhaps? No. Here's the kicker. It's written for Microsoft .Net 2.0. Just between FlashDevelop and my product, www.thekbase.com, I'll have to have Windows around for a while.
On the FlashDevelop site they say

Mac OSX/Linux compatible using virtualization software (VirtualBox, VMWare, Parallel)

I'll have to try out some VMWare on my Ubuntu Virtual Appliance (thanks http://chrysaor.info).

While writing this post in my Gmail I realize just how screwed up Chrome is. I'll get back to it in six months. Now if you want to pay me to beta test, I'm in!