Adobe AIR and Adobe Flash Player Team Blog

We’re excited to announce that Flash Player 10.3 is now available for Android, Linux, MacOS, and Windows. Flash Player 10.3 improves stability, enhances security and user privacy protection, and provides new desktop video and audio capabilities for enterprises and developers. Intrepid developers can also check out a set of new bleeding-edge technologies in the Flash Player Incubator program on Adobe Labs. On the device side, with the rollout of Android 3.1 users of Honeycomb tablets like the Motorola XOOM will experience performance improvements introduced in Flash Player 10.2. For more information on how Google’s update to Honeycomb improves the experience of content designed for Flash Player, visit the Flash Platform blog.

New features in Flash Player 10.3 include:

• Media measurement (desktop only) – Measuring video usage just got easier. Using Adobe® SiteCatalyst® with Flash Player 10.3, developers can implement video analytics for websites with as little as two lines of code for the first time. Media Measurement for Flash Player allows companies to get real-time, aggregated reporting of how their video content is distributed, what their audience reach is, and how much video is played. Mobile support will be available in an upcoming release.
• Acoustic echo cancellation (desktop only) – With Flash Player 10.3, developers can create real-time online collaboration experiences with high-quality audio for telephony, in-game voice chat, and group conferencing applications. Developers can take advantage of acoustic echo cancellation, noise suppression, voice activity detection, and automatic compensation for various microphone input levels. End users will be able to experience higher quality audio facilitating smoother conversation flow, without using a headset.
• Enhanced privacy protection – Flash Player 10.3 enables local storage clearing within browsers’ privacy settings and streamlines the controls of the Flash Player privacy, security and storage settings within the local control panel of desktop OSes.
• Security enhancements including the support of auto-update notification for MacOS – See the Security Bulletin APSB11-12 for more details.

For more information on the new features and a list of bug fixes, see Flash Player 10.3 release notes.

The Flash Player Incubator is also being updated today, highlighting new technologies and APIs that will provide further enhancements for performance, security, as well as support video and Customer Experience Management (CEM) solutions. See detailed feature descriptions on Adobe Labs, let us know what you think on the Incubator forum or report bugs.

Finally, we now have an official name for one of our first Incubator technologies — the project formerly known by the code name “Molehill” will be called Stage 3D.  Stage 3D is a new method/model of 2D and 3D rendering developed by Adobe and is supported with a new Stage3D API.  The Stage3D API is a set of low-level GPU-accelerated APIs enabling advanced 2D and 3D capabilities across multiple screens and devices (desktop, mobile and TV). These new low-level APIs will provide 2D and 3D engine developers the flexibility to leverage GPU hardware acceleration for significant performance gains. The excitement and community response has been amazing. Stage 3D (code name “Molehill”) was also recently honored by Computer Graphics World following the Game Developers Conference as a recipient of its Silver Edge Awards, a designation presented to companies whose product represents the best of show at the industry’s leading conferences and exhibitions. From Computer Graphics World’s April 2011 print edition, its editors noted, “Using the new 3D APIs in Adobe Flash Player and AIR will make it possible to deliver sophisticated 3D experiences across almost every computer and device connected to the Internet.”

We hope you enjoy the improved performance and new features in Flash Player 10.3 on desktop and Android devices, and please continue to provide us feedback on the capabilities we’re demonstrating in the Incubator.

With today’s launch of Internet Explorer 9, the Adobe Flash Player team is excited to highlight the results of our collaboration around both hardware acceleration and end-user privacy. Both companies believe that the best experience with the web is achieved when browsers and web runtimes like Flash Player are tightly integrated to ensure that the web browsing experience is seamless and highly interactive.

As part of the South by Southwest conference, we shared a demo that highlights the work we’ve done together in terms of hardware acceleration. In this case, 3D content in Flash directly participates in Internet Explorer’s hardware rendering pipeline, as exposed through the ISurfacePresenter API. For web developers, this means that hardware accelerated features in Flash, such as stage video and 3D graphics, will directly leverage the power of the GPU in the presentation process. This translates to a more responsive and efficient web browsing experience.

If you’d like to learn more about the new features coming in Flash Player, check out this post on the team blog. If you’re interested in learning about the new 3D capabilities, called project “Molehill”, you can read about them as part of our new Incubator program. I encourage you to check out the demos to get a feel for the power of Flash and tell us what you think.

We are excited about the launch of the Chrome notebook Pilot program. Since we announced the support of Adobe Flash Player in Google Chrome, the engineers have undertaken some extensive work on more tightly integrating our technologies. This work has taken a few forms including an integrated update system, plus improvements to security, end-user privacy, and performance advancements on operating systems like Windows and Mac OS. As we look forward, there’s a long list of integration opportunities ahead to improve and optimize the web browsing experience.

In terms of Chrome notebooks specifically, as with many aspects of the device, Flash Player 10.1 support remains a work in progress. Video performance in particular is the primary area for improvement and we are actively working with the engineers at Google to address this. Enabling video acceleration will deliver a more seamless experience on these devices. Because Flash Player is integrated directly into Chrome Notebooks, users will automatically benefit from the latest features and improvements as new versions of the software are pushed out.

The work we’re doing on acceleration for video in Flash Player is a top priority because the vast majority of video on the web is delivered using Flash.  As a matter of fact, adoption of Flash video streaming is on the rise with a more than 100% year-over-year growth over the past two years. Just in one month alone, we are now seeing 120 petabytes of video streamed, that’s 128 billion megabytes!  Chrome notebooks provide yet another opportunity for Adobe’s three million Flash developers to deliver their rich, interactive content to end-users.  The multi-screen opportunity is truly upon us and getting stronger by the day.

Paul Betlem
Sr. Director, Engineering

A few weeks back, we added a late-breaking session titled "How to Build Adobe AIR Apps for the iPhone and Android" by Adobe AIR team member Christian Cantrell to the MAX conference schedule. Within just a couple of weeks, this session sold out indicating that the subject matter was important to many designers and developers attending MAX this year.

Based on popular demand, I am very pleased to announce that a second version of this talk will place on Wednesday, October, 27th, from 8:00A.M. – 9:00A.M. If you or members of your company are building mobile applications for Android and/or iOS devices, you will not want to miss Christian’s session!

Thank you Christian for offering to jump in and repeat your session!

Additional information:

• Session details
• Register for MAX

Today we’re making available a preview of Adobe® Flash® Player that we’re calling “Square.” This preview includes support for two new areas, namely enhanced support for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9 Beta and native 64-bit support for all major desktop operating systems including Linux, Mac, and Windows.

As part of our collaboration with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team over the past few months, Flash Player “Square” has been enhanced to directly support the hardware-accelerated graphics capabilities in the newest version of IE. Flash Player “Square” leverages the new GPU support available with Internet Explorer 9 Beta to deliver a faster and more responsive user experience. In our internal testing, we’ve seen significant improvements in Flash Player graphics performance – exceeding 35% in Internet Explorer 9 Beta compared to Flash Player running in previous versions of IE. While the performance improvements will vary based on the type of content and how it’s created, bitmap-heavy content for Flash Player will experience the greatest benefit. Content created for Flash Player that’s embedded as transparent (wmode=”transparent”) will also run more efficiently given the benefits of offloading the HTML and Flash content compositing to the GPU. Try it out by downloading the Internet Explorer 9 Beta and the Flash Player “Square” preview. We’d appreciate your feedback and observations on performance.

The community has been very vocal around the need for native 64-bit support and we’ve heard you loud and clear. Today we’re also sharing a refresh of the Linux 64-bit version of Flash Player together with the first preview of both the 64-bit Windows and Mac versions. If you’re using a 64-bit browser, I encourage you to install a 64-bit version of Flash Player and give it try. Those using the previous 64-bit version of Flash Player for Linux should find this new version even faster and more reliable.  These new versions are fully functional, so all content should be compatible. We’ve found “Square” to be stable and ready for broad testing, but keep in mind this a sneak peak and not everything will be fully baked. If you encounter any issues, I’d encourage you to file a bug in our public database so we can investigate.

I hope you enjoy this early preview into some of the areas of focus for the Flash Player team. I encourage you to take the opportunity to try them out and share your feedback with us.

We are pleased to announce the first update release of the Flash Player 10.1 binary for Android devices.  Earlier this summer, in June 2010, we released Flash Player 10.1 to all of our OEM Open Screen Project partners and achieved general availability of the Player binary for all Android 2.2 (“Froyo”) devices on August 16, 2010.  This update release includes new device optimizations for recently certified devices, additional bug fixes, and security updates.

While many of our OEM partners will be shipping their new devices with Flash Player 10.1 pre-installed, we highly encourage you to download the latest version of Flash Player from Android Market so that you will be able to receive auto-notifications from Android Market when new update releases and versions become available.  If you do not update the pre-installed Flash Player, you won’t receive auto-notification from Android Market for new update releases.  These updates will include new certified device optimizations and feature enhancements, and will also provide security and bug fixes.

As we continue our collaboration with our silicon partners, and as our OEM partners go through the device certification process for Flash Player 10.1 for their new devices, we are receiving more information and insights on how we can further optimize our runtime for variances between device models and OEMs, including, for example, for hardware H.264 video decoding and the performance of OpenGL ES drivers.  We are also identifying device/chipset specific bug fixes and optimizations as Flash Player is supported across a broader set of hardware and devices.

As new devices come through certification, we will be providing regular Flash Player update releases to Android Market that will include device optimizations and security updates as appropriate. Now that we’ve deployed a single binary for all Android devices, we can seamlessly deliver new capabilities and optimization to all supported devices using Android Market.

Earlier this year, we released a public preview of Flash Player called “Gala” that included support for H.264 GPU decoding on Mac OS X. We’re happy to announce that this feature is now officially enabled in the latest Flash Player, and it can significantly improve the performance of HD video. You’ll see these additional benefits on Macs with Mac OS X 10.6.4 or later supported by the Apple Video Decode Acceleration framework, including most MacBook, MacBook Pro, iMac, and Mac mini models shipped in 2009 or later. You can read more about the technical details behind Mac hardware decoding on our earlier blog post. And go get it.

Flash Player 10.1 introduced numerous major performance and power management enhancements, and the Mac in particular benefits from improvements that include full Cocoa support, graphics hardware acceleration using Core Animation, faster code execution, significant memory optimizations, and now GPU video decoding support. We’ve also got some major enhancements in the pipe that will further enhance how content is experienced using the Flash Player – stay tuned.

Tom Nguyen
Product Manager, Flash Player

We’ve just released an update to Flash Player 10.1. Google Chrome users have Flash Player integrated into their browser, and Google has begun pushing out automatic updates to Chrome users. If you’re using Chrome, you’ll automatically get the latest Flash Player, and most users will be updated within 24 hours (the Dev channel will be updated by the end of the week).

Chrome 5.0 users who can’t wait to get the new version of Flash Player can select “About Google Chrome” under the Tools menu (indicated by the wrench icon near the Chrome address bar) to trigger the latest update.

In addition, developers can view this TechNote to learn how to download a separate version of Flash Player manually and use it with Chrome. However, we recommend that Chrome users simply wait to receive an automatic update and benefit from the seamless upgrade via their browser.

Tom Nguyen
Product Manager, Flash Player