Flash Player 9

Jul 10 2006

Flash Player 9

(4 votes)

Flash - Flash Stories

Written by eyez

As has been pointed out, the previous article about the Player 9 beta is already outdated, as Flash Player 9 has been released at the end of June 2006. This was going to be version 8.5, but the importance of the new virtual machine, the ECMAScript 4-based ActionScript 3.0 language have decided the team to update the version number to 9.

What's new?

up to 10 times faster performance through ActionScript 3.0 and a new ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM)
a Just In Time (JIT) compiler that translates ActionScript bytecode to native machine code for maximum execution speed
new application runtime capabilities for Adobe Flex 2
ActionScript 3.0 is a powerful, object-oriented ECMAScript-compliant programming language that provides a familiar syntax and compelling new language features such as ECMAScript for XML (E4X), regular expressions, and a standardized DOM event model,...
more efficient memory utilization, faster application start-times, improved debugging and full runtime error reporting
Flash Player Express Install and auto-update notification for current Flash Player users (click image to watch a demo)

Before you read further, you might want to download the new player?!

Note that you may have recieved automatic update notification already?! If not you may want to change your settings (and a few others).

Some usefull links:

The Adobe Flash Player Settings Manager lets you manage global privacy settings, storage settings, security settings, and automatic notification settings!
If you are not sure which version of the Player is currently installed on your computer, you can test online.
If you want more information about the new stuff, read the Release Notes.
There's also an extensive "Introducing.." article by Emmy Huang (Senior Product Manager for Flash Player) available.

Please note that Adobe is actively working on the Linux version of Flash Player 9. [They] expect to make a pre-release version available on Adobe Labs for early feedback and testing before the end of the year, with the full release expected in early 2007 (Emmy Huang -dates subject to change at any time).

If this is a topic of interest for you, you can follow progress on Mike Melansons blog.

Other information, for example about the detection kit, SWFObject, Javascript interaction etc are on the Flash Player Dev Center!

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