Adobe Launches Preview of 64-bit Flash Player with Hardware Accelerated Graphics in IE9

Posted by Dionysios G. Synodinos on Sep 17, 2010

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Adobe has made available a preview of Adobe Flash player code-named “Square” that includes native 64-bit support for Linux, Mac, and Windows. It also includes enhanced support for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9 Beta.

The preview takes advantage of hardware accelerated graphics in Internet Explorer 9 Beta, utilizing hardware rendering surfaces to improve graphics performance and enable seamless composition.

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.

You can download and take this preview for a test drive, having in mind the following known issues:

• Video playback might have problems on certain websites
• Content protection using Adobe Flash Access is not yet supported
• Since IE9 is not yet final, there are several issues that Adobe and Microsoft are trying to solve,
• This release will not receive automatic update notifications, and users will need to manually

You can find more news about Flash, Flex and Adobe right here on InfoQ!

Dionysios G. Synodinos is a Web Engineer and a freelance consultant, focusing on Web technologies

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1. Back to top

   The real questions are

   by peter lin

   Is it more stable and does it use less memory? Or does the acceleration just make it crash faster?

   Reply

2. Back to top

   Re: The real questions are

   by Dionysios Synodinos

   Hi Peter, you can check out the user forums to see how solid this preview is. Also there are some people that are already doing simple benchmarks: forums.adobe.com/community/labs/flashplayer10/

   Reply

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   I just tried it on Ubuntu 10.04, and...

   by Dave Nicolette

   ...it seemed to work well.
   
   Using Firefox, when I followed the prompt from YouTube to the Abode download site, it identified my OS as Linux and offered a drop-down list of installation methods. I chose apt. That resulted in an error message saying it was a virtual package, and offering no workaround.
   
   In a Terminal window, I entered 'sudo apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree'. This installed the plugin correctly. I've only used it a little so far, but it appears to work fine.

   Reply

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   Re: I just tried it on Ubuntu 10.04, and...

   by Dave Nicolette

   On second thought, this might not have been the 'preview release' described in the article. Never mind.

   Reply

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   Good we can now move to 64bit browsers

   by Faisal Waris

   Today, most are forced to use the 32bit version of browsers because Flash and Silverlight are 32bit.
   
   Adobe's move will force MS to release 64bit Silverlight making the move to 64bit browsers feasible.

   Reply