Flash Player 11 in Early October, Says Adobe
by Andrew Cunningham on September 21, 2011 9:02 PM ESTFlash Player 11, the next major version of Adobe's near-ubiquitous browser plug-in, is now officially set for release in early October, the company said in a press release today. Adobe AIR (the runtime which allows Flash and other code to be run as desktop apps) will also be updated to version 3.
The press release details a few of Flash 11's new features, but there are two that are of particular interest to you, the discerning AnandTech reader: the first is GPU acceleration for 2D and 3D graphics, which is specifically designed to make Flash games run better (Flash's GPU acceleration was previously limited mostly to video). The second is 64-bit support under Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, long a sticking point for users of 64-bit operating systems. As one of the modern Internet's most-used plug-ins, Flash carries a lot of weight, and I don't think I'm the first to link the absence of 64-bit Flash with the slow pace of 64-bit browser development and adoption.
Flash 11 promises to be an improvement over Flash 10.3 in many ways, but its competition is still stiff: the Unity Web Player is already driving 3D games in browser windows today, while the Silverlight plug-in also enables rich web content. Its most direct competition in the long run remains HTML5, which Apple (and soon, Microsoft) and others are pushing to enable rich content without the use of plug-ins
Source: Adobe
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Euklide - Thursday, September 29, 2011 - link
There is no turning back: Flash player 11 with its hardware acceleration will change the face of the internet: The web will simply turn 3D. This will take some time, but in less than one year there will be many impressive and highly useful 3D websites (aside from game sites) that will give a new meaning to "web surfing"! The difficult part is to make good use of the third dimension -still an unexplored field for information visualization, interactivity and usability, so it will be a challenge for innovation and will boost these fields and therefore 3D interface evolution. In comparison, HTML5 is way too limited to compete.Of course Adobe (and Macromedia) should have done this 11+ years ago. They are dinosaurs, but at least, Flash is ONE consistent standard, instead of a multi-confusing, chaotic, semi-implemented, arbitrary, each-browser doing-its-thing, each-supporting-a-different-subset FAILED-standard as were HTML and Javascript for so many years! The browser developers have FAILED MISERABLY to make or obbey a single standard and this paranoia will continue with HTML5!
Now Apple is a great company, but they should put the user (their customers) FIRST, not force them or limit them - this is a huge marketing mistake that they will most likely pay soon or later!
In sort, I personally prefer to develop for ONE single standard that runs consistently across all browsers in 98% of PCs and (soon) in most mobile devices too. I don't want to fight each time with each browser's idiosygracy while chasing their miserable updates in daily basis! Users want consistency for piece of mind too.