07/04/2008, 8:20pm, EDT
Friday, July 4th
Adobe Flash Player 10: 3x Mac performance boost? [u]
Adobe this week released Flash Player 10 beta 2, an early preview version of the nearly ubiquitous media plugin for browsers and for Flash/video playback. Version 10 of the player, code named "Astro," brings custom filters and effects, 3D effects, and a new text engine with text layout Components. Most importantly, however, it will bring a huge performance boost for Mac users: "If you have followed GUIMark at all you will notice that this version of the player runs this benchmark substantially better on OSX than any previous Flash Player version. It should be up to 3 times faster. How will this affect you? Well, OSX device text rendering got a huge performance boost. If you use lots of device text you will see a big difference."
In addition, version 10 adds drawing API enhancements, color management, and visual performance boosts, including GPU Compositing, GPU Blitting as well as an anti-Aliasing Engine (Saffron 3.1), a Vector Data Type, dynamic streaming, RTMFP (Real Time Media Flow Protocol), the Speex Audio Codec, and dynamic sound generation. The Beta 2 build now supports enhanced Sound APIs, Linux WMODE and Video4Linux v2, the ability to "unloadAndStop", and limited full-screen keyboard access.
The pre-release version is available for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux platforms and is "being made available for developers and consumers to test their content to ensure new features function as expected, existing content plays back correctly, and there are no compatibility issues." The Flash Player 10 beta is available in all supported languages; however, the pre-release installers are only in English, Adobe noted.
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hooray!
The Mac version is now only 1/2 has fast as the Windows version, while still using 100% of all the CPU cycles. Maybe Adobe should use Microsoft's tag "Works Best on Windows".
2 slow
3x faster is still slower than Flash on Windows.Apple should keep their promises to Adobe, and Adobe should take Apple more seriously. Adobe apps are starting to work better on Windows. Even fonts are working better on Windows, and OSX sucks when it comes to font management.
useless
Is anyone else out there ready to chuck flash out entirely? Aside from its fanboys in the web-design industry, flash doesn't do the rest of us much good- being more widely used as a animated ad platform than for video content. I wish we could agree on a industry standard instead of a proprietary platform when it comes to video plug-ins.
Were it not for a few sites that I need to use on a semi-daily basis, i'd disable it entirely in Safari. It would be nice if there was a block flash button or key-command that we could utilize in safari, then one could just ignore the annoyances and save the proc power when need be.
very slow
I do believe that flash guys optimised some stuff in their player. Honestly, I do. But I use my own method of testing flash: ageofconan.com homepage. On my powerbook 1.67 the starting animation of that site is at about 1 frame per 2 seconds. Updated flash player didn't do any good there. In Windows XP the site runs about 20 times faster, and that's on very very outdated box.
One advise to Adobe: rewrite Mac version from scratch.
I hate flash sites...
...which typically timeout my patience while loading driving me away from rather than attracting me to commercial sites...
These seeming webmaster wet dreams seem increasingly focussed on 'technology' at the expense of clear communication & efficacious provision of useful information...
Did I mention I hate flash sites...?
chuck flash...
AJAX
AJAX is here and it's VERY fast. Soon it will leave its tread marks all over Flash.
Video issues
I'm having a problem where all flash video is now rendered in green and black blocks. Beta 1 and Flash 9 did not have this problem. Anybody else seeing this?
green and black blocks
Same here, went back to 9. Installer for the latest 9 for Power PC is also buggy. It thinks I have an Intel Mac.
some improvements, but
not enough!
The new beta has actually fixed some interface problems with youtube videos for me. And yes, it's faster than version 9 but way slower than any windows flash. Dunno what the future is for this adobe product but they better fix all these performance issues unless they want to loose huge chunk of market entirely.