Adobe releases Flash Player 9

by Peter Cohen, MacCentral

Adobe on Wednesday announced the release of Flash Player 9. It’s a free download for Mac OS X and Windows operating systems.

Adobe claims that Flash Player 9 runs up to 10 times faster than before, thanks to ActionScript 3 and a new ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM) that features a Just In Time (JIT) compiler.

Also new in this release is application runtime support for Flex 2, an Internet application development platform also released Wednesday by Adobe. Flex 2 — available for non-Mac platforms — lets developers build Ajax-style applications.

Flash Player 9 is free; it’s available in English and localized languages. System requirements call for Mac OS X v10.1 or later, Firefox 1.x, Mozilla 1.x, Netscape 7.x or later, AOL for Mac OS X, Opera 6, Safari 1.x or later.

Flash Player 9 is, at least for now, a PowerPC binary only that will not run natively on Intel-based Macs. Adobe said it plans to support Intel-based Macs with Flash Player 9 after this initial release; in the interim, an Intel-native “ preview release ” of version 8 is available for download.

Adobe said that as an alternative, Intel-based Mac users can run Flash Player using Safari in Rosetta. More details are available at the link above.

Updated 06/28/06 12:01 PM: Details added about Intel binary status.

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