-
Portable Flash player 10
Portable Flash player 10 | 55MB
Adobe has released version 10 of its popular Flash player plugin. Among the major improvements included in the new version, Adobe touts performance enhancements and better support for alternative operating systems. Ars tested Flash Player 10 on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows Vista to see how it fares.
The web collectively got a bit shinier this week with Adobe’s release of Flash Player 10. The new version offers designers a compelling set of new features including support for rich 3D visual effects, a new antialiasing engine, an improved drawing API, support for color management, and enhanced support for streaming audio and video content. With this release, Adobe is clearly taking steps to ensure that Flash stays ahead of the curve and won’t lose traction in the face of competitive pressure from Silverlight.
Typically, the release of an Internet plug-in—even one as widely used as Flash—is interesting mostly to the developers who write software for the platform, but users may have a lot to look forward to in this release, especially those using Linux or Mac OS X. In addition to strengthening Flash’s media and graphics features, Adobe has also labored to improve performance and cross-platform support. Between updates to underlying technologies and some bottleneck sleuthing, Adobe says Flash performance has improved as much as 300 percent for “the rest of us.” Ars Technica decided to investigate whether Adobe was merely blowing smoke in our PDFs.
