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Adobe Releases Flash 11 and AIR 3
iamrmani writes "Software maker Adobe Systems has launched Flash Player 11 and Adobe AIR 3 even as the industry is shifting to HTML 5 on the Web that lessens the reliance of developers on Flash."
The Register has a bit more to say about Adobe's repositioning of Flash for games as a competetive strategy.
is surprised that Adobe would keep releasing products as people start relying on them less. How else are they going to compete.
I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
It seems that Adobe doesnt want to go out without a fight. This will not save flash though. Without iOS support, flash will not be able to survive. I guess I should be thankful to apple.
I am happy to see that we can finally get rid of flash on the web. (It'll most likely still stay in gaming (Scaleform))
On a side note, what does this story have to do with apple?
Some (all?) videos with ads still require flash unfortunately.
Why is this story tagged under Apple?
Isn't OSX Flash 10 still in Beta?...
Adobe is positioning their Flash-based platforms to be a platform for mature applications instead of widgets and applets.
I wonder if Microsoft will expose the new WinRT API to Flash or AIR?
The launch comes at a time when the industry is shifting from Flash and embracing HTML 5 on the Web that lessens the reliance of developers on Flash. HTML5 is gaining momentum each day as tech giants such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook are supporting it.
To what extent is this true and to what extent is it bullying? I mean, "oh damn the competition just wont go away! even though it can't possibly win!". That's what those sentences sound like to me.
a.) In a capitalistic society, believe it or not, competition is great! It's one of the few things that enforces sane prices and wages, and has the benefit of not being decreed by a government regulator.
b.) Even if a technology is inferior and/or 'old' doesn't mean it's going away. Fortran, anyone?
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
From the article:
"Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 are scheduled for release in early October. Adobe didn't give the date, but you should expect release at Adobe's annual Max conference, between 1 and 5 October."
No comment.
Yes. "64-bit support on Linux, Mac OS and Windows ensures a seamless experience with the latest 64-bit browsers." "H.264 hardware decoding is now available for AIR applications on Apple's iOS, while Flash now works with 64-bit on Windows, Mac and Linux and in the browser."
... on it's security-hole-riddled history, javascript in the browser (XSS) is also a favorite attack vector. But at least it is a little less black-boxish.
For security sake, maybe we should just go back to punch cards!?!?!?
Que Deus te de em dobro o que me desejas
[May God give you double that which you wish for me]
How would you like to make all versions of Internet Explorer for Windows behave just like Chrome? Would that shorten your QA cycle? It's possible with the "Google Chrome Frame" browser helper object that Google makes available.
As long as content creators support Flash, it will still exist. Newgrounds, as an example, still has a large community of flash artists and programmers, which regularly provide animations and games for free.
When these sites make the transition, Flash may die. Until then, it may be used significantly less, but it will still be there.
The good, the evil and the vacuum tubes.
Yes, HTML5 works wonderfully for video made of pixels. But for video made of vectors (e.g. almost everything on Weebl's Stuff or Newgrounds), Flash still way outperforms animated SVG in rendering speed, and it outperforms rasterization and compression with H.264 by a factor of about ten in bitrate.
Flash is still listed on Adobe's site as 10.x....
Michael
http://s1.sfgame.us/index.php?rec=58163
I'd suggest a googlefight, but googlefight uses flash ...
(Actually, it's because googlefight.com is broken. It no longer returns an accurate summary of the total number of hits for each expression).
What do you have to do different to get, say, Strong Bad Emails or Badger Badger Badger to play on a device with no Flash Player?
It essentially allows you to write an application in flash, but not have it anchored in the web browser.
HTML 5 offers better performance
If SVG animation or canvas animation offers better performance than Flash animation, then why hasn't an alternative to Newgrounds for SVG or canvas cartoons emerged?
still Adobe Flash Player version 10.3.183.10
the Release Candidate from the labs is currently the only thing available in version 11 flavour. come to think of it
its the only thing present in an x64 flavour as almost every OS on the planet has switched to 64 bit while adobe quietly drags its heels
and rapidly advancing technologies like HTML5 step quickly past it.
how much longer before we transition from evaluating adobe flash releases in terms of 'wow thats neat' to 'no one cares.'
Flash is a resource intensive security nightmare with a parent company so detatched from customers and industry it occasionally stops
commenting entirely on the state of patches and bugfixes that in many cases are a detriment to their entire business model.
Good people go to bed earlier.
This looks more like an Announcement than a Release. The bits won't be available for download until October. However, there was a new version of Flash Player 10 released today (10.3.183.10) that resolves a cross-site scripting issue.
I know the real reason why they are announcing Flash 11 now-- they are almost out of alphabet letters for Flash 10! If you look at the "Macromed" folder (Yeah, it still refers to Macromedia even 6 years after being acquired) under System32/SysWOW64 folder you'll find the browser plugins. The version today released today (10.3.183.10) is named "FlashUtil10x_Plugin.exe" and the version before that was of course "FlashUtil10w_Plugin.exe". That only gives them two more letters to use before they have to figure out a new naming scheme. Best to go to a new version number so they can start over from the beginning of the alphabet. ::chuckle::
Without question, Flash has it's issues. However, as good as HTML5 may be I still think Flash is superior. It's relatively easy to build something robust and cross platform consistency is a non-issue. Build something in Flash and you know it's going to look identical in Windows, OSX and Linux. Wasn't there that interactive site for a band recently mentioned on Slashdot that ran only in Chrome? That's HTML5.
And performance, especially with graphics, is unquestionably superior in Flash than it is in HTML5. I've seen countless HTML5 demos, some of which impress, but most pale in comparison to what I've seen done in Flash. I have a friend who's been working on an HTML5-based 3D render and performance is an on-going issue. Of course, Flash has the advantage of inherently supporting hardware acceleration. But either way, this is one of the things that needs to be addressed whether it be with HTML5 itself or how browsers themselves operate.
Also important is how easy it is to build something in Flash. HTML5 doesn't yet have a comparable authoring environment. That said, this is a big part of what's leading to Flash's downfall. Rank amateurs can pick up Flash and create something. This has brought about a saturation of bad Flash. This is best reflected in the design industry where the perception is that Flash is a designer's tool. For years I've encountered programmers who scoff that the suggestion that they should learn Actionscript. Of course, this results in crap code, which gives rise to all the problems experienced on the web.
On the other hand, I have no love for Adobe. So from that perspective I'd like to see Flash die and I'm certainly happy there's a viable competitor out there. But I will lament the loss of Flash.
We have prenotification of Flash security holes being exploited in the wild:
http://blogs.adobe.com/psirt/2011/09/prenotification-security-update-for-flash-player.html
Flash is a mess with dubious value. A new version doesn't fix that.
The software used to produce it doesn't really require Flash as an export format - though it is very low-bandwidth.
And that's my point: sending the cartoon as vectors uses far less bandwidth than rendering the cartoon to pixels and compressing those. This becomes especially important as home ISPs lower their monthly download caps and as users shift use from wired ISPs, which have large caps, to cellular ISPs, which have much smaller caps. In theory, HTML5 supports vector animation playback by scripting SVG or canvas, but I've read anecdotal reports that browsers are still much less CPU-efficient at rendering vector animation than Flash Player.
Of course the OP didn't bother to actually link to the real product announcement, instead just to some site slagging Flash. If any of you are under the impression that Flash is going away just because it wont be used for banner ads or video.. Just take a look at the type of 3D games that are currently being developed in Flash: http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplatform/ Tell me with a straight face that people will be doing games like that in html the near future. I just don't get the hate.. each technology has its place. Once intrusive banner ads are done in html 5 and crappy javascript code is slowing your browser down, will you start hating HTML and Javascript just as much?
*** DRINK MORE COFFEE ***
That isn't the norm in a corporate environment.
Yep, the only really useful application I ever ran into for AIR was the Pandora One client because it could add controls to the notification bar and be controlled by keyboard shortcuts. Now I just use the Anesidora Pandora extension for Chrome.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
So it appears your core issue is that a web application comes in multiple files, as opposed to a .swf that has multiple resources packed into it. Let me introduce you to the data URI, which works in any browser passing Acid2.
I don't see that as an impossibility... though the immaturity of WebSockets, and limited support in Web frameworks under .Net and Java will hinder early adoption. One of Flash's biggest assets, imho, has been the ability to utilize socket communication. It's even been used as a socket adapter for older browsers for WebSocket use. Beyond that, most of what Flash offers (other than packaging) can be done in X/HTML5.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
Am I really the only person who is not looking forward to HTML5 taking over in that every ad on the internet will be some sort of flashy HTML5 element that can't be easily removed without breaking the rest of the webpage?
Not that I think Flash is going anywhere soon. There will always be a big place for Flash on the internet in the foreseeable future.
Also, Steam.
... to finally get 64bit support? Although I have to say a few years ago, when I started running Ubuntu amd64, it would have been more useful. Nowadays there are a number of decent workarounds, Google Chrome being one of them, npviewer another.
Yeah, I too am really looking forward to flashy HTML5 ads that can't be easily hidden or removed without breaking the rest of the webpage it's sitting on.
Proxies certainly are the norm in a corporate environment.
As a CISSP security consultant, I can tell you that +95% of my firm's clients (Fortune 500/1000 companies and government organizations) require all their internal workstations to browse thru a proxy. Any enterprise network admin that still lets his internal workstations have routability or NAT directly to the public internet this day and age is a security moron at best... and is guilty of willful negligence at worst. Half a decade ago, the professional world began to implement web proxies for their internal web browsing... mostly because all the best tier-1 security appliances that monitor, record and report all employees' web use are implemented as proxies.
Small companies haven't caught on yet, but they will.
Forgot that the Steam client is AIR based, ok two good uses =)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
A Debug version for us, low life, scum of the earth, lousy dirt bag, developers? Please?
As a developer who uses a proxy to debug Flash/Flex applications all day, every day, I can assure you that Flash 10.x does, in fact, support using the browser's proxy settings.
If not, this tool wouldn't work:
http://www.charlesproxy.com/
I'm assuming that there is something subtle about your proxy use that is causing the issue... because if millions of people weren't able to play farmville or watch youtube in their corporate cubicle, Google and Zynga and Facebook and nearly everyone else would be crying foul.
It's the norm in my corporate environment. We're a publicly-traded global enterprise. I guess it could be a lot more common at the larger sizes than smaller, but who wouldn't want to run a caching proxy to help conserve their bandwidth anyway?
Remember them? They gave away a 'free' plugin that let you view streaming video. The server software was the moneymaker and the 'free' plugin was the hook. Hopefully, flash will be the same forgotten status in a year or so, lost in the sea of open-sourced options.
Couldn't agree more. If you looked back five years, you would find that HTML was handling the standard web media like images and text and layouts, and Flash was handing the rich internet media like video and interactives. That really isn't changing, what is changing is where we draw the line between standard and rich content. Now we expect things like Video, Audio, and some simple interactives to be considered standard, and things like in-browser 3D, heavy vector graphics, hardware acceleration and a complete OOP environment to be rich media. The notion that HTML 5 is competing with Flash is true, its just that its competing with Flash Player 8, not 11.
>"Software maker Adobe Systems has launched Flash Player 11"
Correction:
"Software maker Adobe Systems has launched Flash Player 11 but only for MS-Windows."
Download Adobe Flash Player
Adobe Flash Player version 10.3.183.10
Your system: Linux, Firefox
Download Adobe Flash Player
Adobe Flash Player version 10.3
Your system: MacOS 10.4-10.7
One version works. The next, crashes like Nascar racers.
And people don't like NASCAR crashes?
> Just take a look at the type of 3D games that are currently being developed in Flash
If I enable 3d hardware acceleration in flash the plugin crashes. This is happening on all versions released this year and Adobe don't seem to be able to fix it. So what use is it doing 3D if it's going to crash all the time?
I use 3D in flash ALL THE TIME with no trouble. Granted, I am usually using the Papervision3D library, which is technically a 3D mock-up of a 2D implementation. I also have 3d hardware acceleration turned on, and I don't have any issues with that. I do this on both Windows 7 and Ubuntu Linux platforms. Is your problem an OSX thing? I only here from people on OSX that Flash is unstable, everyone else has no trouble with it. Then again, maybe that's not surprising since Mac and Adobe aren't exactly BFF's anymore...
BBC iPlayer uses AIR. I believe it's also sometimes used as a client-side for otherwise Java enterprise applications. It looks like it can compete well with Java WebStart's model for distributing applications, too.
No it's windows xp actually. I see a lot of posts on the forums with the same problem