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.
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.