Adobe
has released the next major version of the multimedia plugin. Adobe's Flash
Player 10 is
available from this page for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux - including Ubuntu
7 and 8. Tom Barclay, senior product marketing manager, Platform Business Unit,
Adobe Systems, said Adobe Flash Player 10 delivers enhancements and new features
such as new support for custom filters and effects, native 3-D transformation
and animation, advanced audio processing, and GPU hardware acceleration. In
addition, the new release builds on Adobe's expertise with text to deliver a new
text engine that provides interactive designers and developers with more text
layout options and better creative control.
TechReport gave the new plug-in a shot, and while we didn't see a huge
difference in CPU usage on a Core 2 Duo E6400, maximizing YouTube videos did
feel noticeably snappier. Disabling hardware acceleration through the plug-in
settings somehow didn't affect that, however. After investigating the matter,
they found
this blog post written on May 16 by Adobe software engineer Tinic Uro. In
the post, Uro says web developers actually have to enable GPU acceleration
manually in the code. Stranger yet, the new GPU-accelerated modes can supposedly
slow down content, because "the software rasterizer in the Flash Player can
optimize a lot of cases the GPU cannot optimize." So much for that. With that
said, I just installed and tried something with lots of vectoring and it doesn't
seem to do anything :-)