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
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