Adobe Launches Flash Player 10.1 Prerelease Build

[Dougmwpsu]

You would think that Apple would roll out the red carpet for Adobe. Love it or hate it, flash is a critical part of what the majority of their customer base does on the web.

Also, Adobe seems to enjoy zinging everyone else over their "painful lack of developer support."

 

[ChazUK]

Flash Player 10.1 Prerelease

The following downloads will install Flash Player 10.1 prerelease for Windows, Intel-based Macintosh and Linux desktop operating systems. See the Release Notes for more information.

Important: All users should uninstall any currently installed Flash Player before installing the latest prerelease.

Download plug-in for Windows (EXE, 2.2 MB)
Download active-x for Windows (EXE, 2.2 MB)
Download plug-in for Intel-based Macintosh (DMG, 9.4 MB)
Download plug-in for Linux (TAR.GZ, 4.4 MB)

PPC left out again?

EDIT - Once mounted the DMG is called "Install Flash Player 10 UB"

I assume UB means Universal Binary?

 

[Bernd]

Just say no to Flash(ers)

I hate flash ads so flash is disabled on my machine. I refuse to click on flash ads. I hate blinking noisy ads on web sites. I turn flash on only for sites I navigate to to see a specific item/story I then turn it off again. I hate the fact with flash ads safari will idle at 20-40% CPU usage with flash on. Flash needs to die.

 

[Fuchal]

How do plugins like Cooliris access the GPU when Flash cannot?

 

[biblicabeebli]

Yuppers, certainly helps

Got the 10.1 beta installed for a little while now and haven't noticed any problems at all.

Youtube works, Hulu works, didn't think it would effect Netflix (it's not flash but Silverlight), but I checked anyway and that works too.
ClickToFlash also runs fine.

I ran Machinarium, a big flash game with beautiful art made with lots of layers, on my macbook pro, and it was running 20˚C cooler with half the cpu usage than it did with the previous version. Didn't even need to turn the fans up.

Absolutely worth the risk of bugs for running a beta.

 

[jav6454]

Abobe thinks they can play cute with Apple, they are in for quite a surprise. Just like MS released Silverlight for Windows, Apple can release there own Flash plug-in... all it takes is pissed off Jobs and a bit of time.

 

[Michaelgtrusa]

I have it now, but i'll have to watch it closely.

 

[uaecasher]

worth the try

 

[199708]

OSX is horrible when it comes to flash. I really hope this makes my user experience a whole lot better on my mac.

 

[LagunaSol]

For Flash 10.1, Adobe should use Microsoft's Windows 7 tagline:

"Now Sucks Less!"

 

[Erwin-Br]

Ouch, Adobe screws Apple hard. Photoshop also runs much better on Windows nowadays, with full 64-bit support and all. Not good.

 

[skellener]

For Flash 10.1, Adobe should use Microsoft's Windows 7 tagline:

"Now Sucks Less!"

I prefer "Still Sucks."

 

[netddos]

Above comments...baseless criticism on Windows...I agree Vista was a piece of xxxx but with 7 they improved the overall user experience by several folds. (Yes I do realize Windows 7 is like service pack 2 of Vista...but who cares if it works right)

All those who bash on Adobe..

it's not like they were too lazy to include hardware-accelerated decoding feature in flash 10.1...

it's Apple's stubbornness to not provide Adobe with the right APIs to optimize Flash...

On the side note...does anyone have a good speculation as to why Apple's so opposed of making Flash better platform on OSX? Flash is a large part of things I do on computer so it affects my computing experience by a lot..

 

[in one ear]

breaks iplayer in PLEX .. pity as it was nice not to have the fans making so much noise..

 

[Mal]

Abobe thinks they can play cute with Apple, they are in for quite a surprise. Just like MS released Silverlight for Windows, Apple can release there own Flash plug-in... all it takes is pissed off Jobs and a bit of time.

Actually, Apple's just supporting HTML5 and CSS3. Check out http://www.apple.com/safari/welcome for an example. They want that to replace the current uses for Flash, at least in most cases. I fully support that approach too, because it's fully open and accessible, and neither Apple nor any one other company has any direct control over it (of course, that's only if all of the major web browsers support it correctly (here's looking at you, IE)).

jW

 

[bnerd]

Flash WON'T die so stop wishing it would ... you're wasting your time .. The Flash platform is bigger than it has ever been in it's history and it's getting larger.

You can create an app in flash .. and deploy it on iPhone, PC, Mac, Linux, Mobile, TV, and any other device that will support it.

Not many other technologies can do that!!! So suck it up!!

 

[commander.data]

According to the release notes for Flash Player 10.1, the feature is unavailable on Mac OS X due to a lack of access to the programming interfaces needed to deploy it.

Erm, wasn't this the whole point in snow leopard, sounds like laziness as usual from adobe to me, if they made mac flash better I might be more sympephetic to them not being on the iPhone and supporting web standards more, I'm sticking with clicktoflash for now.

H.264 acceleration in Snow Leopard is limited to Quicktime X and even then is only officially supported on the 9400M. OS X has long lack hardware video acceleration, which seems like a pretty big omission given Apple's focus on multimedia creation with iLife. In fact, I'm pretty sure OS 9 actually had hardware MPEG2 acceleration which was removed in OS X. Apple really should provide a common interface for any program to access GPU acceleration just like they do with Core Image for OpenGL accelerated filter effects. Most modern GPUs can accelerate not only H.264, but also MPEG4 and of course MPEG2. And these features shouldn't just be limited to the 9400M being officially supported seeing that even the ATI X1000 series and nVidia 7000 series in early Intel Macs had partial H.264 acceleration.

 

[Little Endian]

Any improvement is welcome

More efficient Flash hopefully will translate into better battery life on my MBP. Flash based adds in Safari kills battery life. I try to avoid Flash as much as possible as its great way to cut my battery life in half since my CPU is at 100% plus utilization just with a few flash based adds.

 

[madog]

OSX is horrible when it comes to flash. I really hope this makes my user experience a whole lot better on my mac.

Apple can't really be held responsible for Adobe's team of monkey coders for Mac OS X flash. H.264 aside, they have made an inferior app for Mac OS X for years now.

It's like saying that the Mac OS sucks for games. In reality the OS is fine, it's just that developers won't make as much money for their Mac version so they put far less time and effort into making them function as well as they do on Windows. Only a few companies, Blizzard in particular, put the same amount of time into their Mac versions, and it can be seen.

 

[lamadude]

Tons of people bashing Adobe or even microsoft (?) for this, but this is clearly apple's fault for not providing the API's.

Abobe thinks they can play cute with Apple, they are in for quite a surprise. Just like MS released Silverlight for Windows, Apple can release there own Flash plug-in... all it takes is pissed off Jobs and a bit of time.

That makes no sense whatsoever. Sure apple could create a plug in that allows streaming video, such as flash or silverlight, but that doesn't mean at all that big flash based websites like youtube are going to switch to this new apple plugin! Even MS which can push Silverlight in all kinds of updates for its windows users can't break the domination of Flash.

 

[trunkster]

Installed this last night and have seen improvements as well with CPU utilization. YouTube HD was choppy before but now it is smooth. I'll probably still use ClickToFlash sense H.264 uses even less CPU but for sites that ClickToFlash don't work with, this is a welcome update.

 

[greg400]

Flash WON'T die so stop wishing it would ... you're wasting your time .. The Flash platform is bigger than it has ever been in it's history and it's getting larger.

You can create an app in flash .. and deploy it on iPhone, PC, Mac, Linus, Mobile, TV, and any other device that will support it.

Not many other technologies can do that!!! So suck it up!!

I wouldn't be so quick to say that flash is never going to die. Google is already massively supporting HTML5: http://www.youtube.com/html5

Once YouTube starts using HTML5 I think the switch will start to happen on more sites that use flash.

On the topic of the actual release, definitely slight performance boost but it was trash before so i'm still not impressed. So far i've noticed you can't scroll through flash videos anymore, you have to move your mouse cursor off of the flash object (although I think this is how it is on Windows last I checked). I've also noticed that you have to now click inside the flash window to activate the controls on say a YouTube video which is also annoying.

 

[swissmann]

Flash is everywhere it needs to run well on OS X and the iPhone. Please Apple and Adobe work it out quickly.

Try http://www.originaltommys.com without flash. I was trying to find a location to get a great burger on a recent trip with my iPhone and it was very frustrating.

 

[miknos]

Well, flash continues to be crap.

 

[live4ever]

No 64bit as well I suspect.