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Adobe Flash Player 10.1 officially released

by on11 June 2010

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Supports GPU acceleration on select Nvidia, AMD and Intel chips

As avid supporters of Adobe’s Flash Player platform, we have been hopefully awaiting this moment for several months now. Today, the company has released the final version of Flash Player 10.1 to the public, with plans to introduce the mobile version of the software in the second half of 2010.

At Adobe MAX in October 2009, company CTO Kevin Lynch first introduced the public prerelease of Flash Player in Adobe Labs. The fundamental deployment focus behind the new release was that it would take Adobe’s cross-platform experience into a new realm by providing more stable streaming video, peer-to-peer broadcasting, mobile device support with accelerometer and multitouch utilization, content protection for Windows-based business, better out-of-memory management and fewer buffer lags when streaming. However, the biggest improvement that Flash Player 10.1 brings is GPU-accelerated video processing for Windows and Linux users – a feature that will be supported on Mac OS within due time.

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By some estimates, more than three-quarters of the Internet’s video and games are powered by Flash. For the past several months, Adobe Labs engineers have produced seven release candidates and multiple beta releases of the software. In its final stages, Flash Player 10.1 Release Candidate 7 for Windows, Mac and Linux platforms was released on June 2, 2010. Since then, developers have declared the release to be GM (Gold Measure) and released it officially on Adobe.com on the morning of June 10, 2010. According to the company, Flash Player 10.1 is the first runtime release of the Open Screen Project that enables "uncompromised Web browsing of expressive applications, content and video across devices.”

While Steve Jobs and company at Apple have been touting “HTML5” as the latest buzzword in Silicon Valley for venture capitalists, startups and gossipmongers to chatter about, many could argue that “Flash Player 10.1” has been Adobe’s equivalent. The fight is ultimately fueled by an ongoing war for a web with open video standards versus one with more video standards adoption.

Adobe Flash Player 10.1 can be downloaded here and is available in both executable and ActiveX setup environments. In order to install Flash Player 10.1 for both Firefox/Chrome/Opera and Internet Explorer, both setup files must be downloaded (the ActiveX version needs to be downloaded and installed within Internet Explorer, of course). However, it is recommended to first uninstall current versions of the software and run a registry sweeper (see: CCleaner) before proceeding.
Last modified on 12 June 2010
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