Adobe has released its first major version of the Flash player since it took over the reigns from Macromedia. It is promising Version 9, code named Blaze is 10 times faster at certain tasks, making it less of a CPU hog than Flash 8.5.
Adobe has announced its first major release of Flash Player since it acquired Macromedia last April.
Flash Player 9 (formerly Flash Player 8.5) includes many new features, most notably ActionScript 3.0 and a new, much faster ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM2).
Historically, a Flash Player release has come out at the same time as a Flash release, however the new Flash authoring application is still only in alpha stages. This Flash Player release is to support applications built with the newly released Adobe Flex 2, a Flash-based internet application development platform.
ActionScript, an ECMAScript-based programming language, is used to script animation and interactivity into Flash movies and applications.
This new version will be compatible with the proposed next-level ECMAScript, and supports direct XML processing (ECMAScript for XML, aka E4X), strong types, inheritance and mix-in interfaces, and exceptions.
The new virtual machine provides a test ground for rich internet application developers, and features a Just In Time (JIT) compiler that translates ActionScript bytecode to native machine code for maximum execution speed.
All in all, Adobe claims that Flash Player 9 can run ActionScript 10 times faster than its predecessors thanks to AVM2 and a new optimised compiler.
Really, Flash Player 9 presents no huge advantage to the end user at this point of time except that Adobe reckons it will chew your CPU up a bit less when executing Actionscript.
However, it's worth upgrading to because in the long run it will allow you to view sites made using the Flex platform, and it's obviously useful for developers interested in prototyping in Flex.
You can download Flash Player 9 for Windows and Mac OS on Adobe’s website.