Adobe Flash Player 10.3 beta available in Incubator
Adobe has really ramped up its beta efforts! There were already two parallel beta products available at Adobe Labs, and now they add a third to the list.
A while back they released the final version of Flash Player 10.2 for desktops and mobiles, with major improvements to web video support and previewed the next major release of Flash Player (11) with support for hardware-accelerated 3D content. They also have a preview version of Flash Player, code-named “square” that brings 64-bit support for Flash Player on all platforms.
Flash Player 10.3 is now available under the incubator program, and brings a number of updates that correct some long-standing issues with Flash Player.
Flash Player has its own local storage, cache etc. and it wasn’t always clear to users that this data wasn’t being purged when they cleared their private browser data. Flash player 10.3 integrates with browser’s privacy controls in Mozilla Firefox 4, Microsoft Internet Explorer 8, and in future versions of Apple Safari and Google Chrome.
An oddity about Flash Player was that the control panel interface for changing Flash Player privacy, security and storage settings was hosted on Adobe’s site! As such, it wasn’t even available when the user was offline. In this beta version of Flash Player 10.3 there is a native, locally hosted control panel.
Flash Player 10.3 also brings two new features for Flash content developers:
- Media measurement
Flash Player 10.3 includes new APIs to enable better analytics of web video playback, especially in conjunction with the Adobe SiteCatalyst service. - Acoustic Echo Cancellation
Flash Player 10.3 also includes enhancements to the Microphone support in Flash by adding support for echo cancellation, noise supression, voice activitiy detection, and automatic compensation.
In this version Adobe has also added auto-update notifications for Mac OS, so that they can always have an up-to-date version of Flash Player.
You can find out more from the release notes here.