Like that old guy in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Flash isn’t dead, yet. Ten months ago, I wrote that Adobe had a publicly-available beta of a 64-bit Flash player. The beta is now complete, and Adobe released the player today. You can download it from their web site. If you’re running the 64-bit version of Windows 7 (or Vista, heaven forbid), do this. It will improve your experience and make your browsing more stable.

If you aren’t sure whether you’re running the x64 version of Windows, here’s how you find out: press + Pause. This displays the System Properties screen, where you should see something like this:

A few things to look out for:

The installation page might guess wrong that you’re running 32-bit Windows, and show you this:

If that happens, click the “Do you have…” link and choose 64-bit. You may also need to download two versions of the installer: one for Internet Explorer, and another for all other browsers.

One other gotcha to look for: the screen will display a check box to install the Google toolbar or a trial of McAfee anti-virus. By default, the box is checked, so I had to make sure to un-check it. This is very irritating. Whether you call it “shovelware” or “foistware”, it’s very easy to overlook, and then your computer has stuff you didn’t want, slowing it down. This is especially bad for installing anti-virus software, since it will conflict with the one you already have one running. You do have one running…right?

It’s eight weeks since the last major Firefox release, so you know what that means: time for another one. Mozilla just released version 6, which includes…..uh…..some visual enhancements. This is what they call a full version? I’d call it an x.01 version increment.

What’s really annoying is that Mozilla is considering dispensing with version numbers altogether, and just telling you if you have the latest release or not. That’s bad enough for users who might be having technical problems, but even worse for web developers who want to make sure their sites work properly in all browser versions.

There’s a cool Firefox add-in that puts rulers and guides in the browser window, so you can measure things just like in Photoshop, Flash, Quark and most other graphics applications. The add-in is called foxGuide and you can download and install it from Mozilla here. Just be aware that it’s currently a beta release. Like most other add-ins, it’s free, and the developers don’t even seem to be asking for donations. I’m running foxGuide in Firefox 4 beta 9 without a problem.

Once foxGuide is installed, activate it from the pop-up menu when right-clicking the screen:

You can then drag as many horizontal and vertical guidelines on the screen as you want. Remove one at a time by dragging it off the screen, or remove them all by right-clicking and choosing Reset Guides. Or just refresh the browser.

The only minor glitch is that because the rulers lie on top of the screen, they take up a small amount of space (rather than pushing the screen away), so if you want to measure something right at the edge it can take some fiddling. But that isn’t terrible; just make the rulers transparent to see what’s behind them. You probably also want to fix the rulers in place, otherwise they’ll scroll out of view when you scroll the page. You control the preferences with a small control panel in the lower, right corner of the screen.