Adobe Flash Player 10 pre-release refresh
We just just released another pre-release of Flash Player 10 (build 10.0.1.525). Go get it here and make sure you read the release notes. As a reminder, as we are nearing the release it becomes increasingly difficult for us to address bugs, especially if they are not crashers. If you have backwards compatibility issues (and I almost guarantee you that there will be some which will affect your content) please report them here (registration required) or here (no registration required).
There have been numerous stability and performance improvements. The most important additions are support for WMODE=transparent and V4L2 cameras (which is still work in progress) on Linux which addresses two of the top 3 feature requests on this platform.
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. I posted more details in a comment here
Finally the dynamic sound APIs have slightly changed as I announced previously. I will be updating my posts [1][2] later today.
There have been numerous stability and performance improvements. The most important additions are support for WMODE=transparent and V4L2 cameras (which is still work in progress) on Linux which addresses two of the top 3 feature requests on this platform.
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. I posted more details in a comment here
Finally the dynamic sound APIs have slightly changed as I announced previously. I will be updating my posts [1][2] later today.
posted by Tinic Uro at 11:30 AM
15 Comments:
Sounds good, any news on the next flash media server to take advantage of the p2p technology ?
Great work.
Is there debug version available?
Thanks for the update. If we find any bugs, should we submit them to http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform or is there a special FP10 page? Thanks.
Awesome! Just heard about unloadAndStop from Grant. Great work!
Has the RegEx engine had any tweaks to it in Flash 10. The next version of GUIMark I'm working on will be incorporating data parsing and I've found in the past that even a simple String.search() is about 3 times slower then String.indexOf()
Great work, Flash Player 10 looks more promising than ever.
I just have one question, what is the big deal with keyboard input in fullscreen mode ? Is it a security issue, you want to prevent users to enter their password on a fake window logon screen or something like that ?
Honestly, so far I've been avoiding Flash sites as much as possible. It gets a lot of CPU load, turns on my laptop fan, and, when using the battery, it shortens its useful life unacceptably.
It is time to tackle those problems. Anyway, was it so hard to profile it? I just cannot believe it.
Hi,
Great work !! FP10 will definitly rock!
Last week I note a very huge usage of CPU during webcam publishing via Flash Player 9 on mAc OS 10.5.4, I wonder is FP10 will resolve this point ?
Nice to see improvements on OS X, but while we're at it, when are we going to have scroll wheel support on OS ?!!
If I was actual Flash developer, I would browse all the web's top 100 sites with Flash 10 myself. Very high profile sites fail to detect Flash 10 and as a responsible beta tester- I alert both Adobe and sites web developers. Lack of feedback/response from Adobe while extremely busy teams like CNN responding is a bit irritating really.
Thank you guys for especially multi-core enabling and accelerating the OS X powerPC flash in the days of rumours of the OS vendor won't release next version for PPC.
I installed this over the weekend. I noticed the speed improvements on my 12" PowerBook but I had to uninstall it after trying to watch any YouTube videos. Something is screwy with the codec or something.
They were all green and deteriorated looking like watching a bad DVD rip. And yes, it was all the videos.
@Benjamin: That's exactly it.
Why is Flash Player for OSX still about half as slow as Flash Player for Windows?
I have a Macbook pro which I can boot under OSX or Windows XP.
I installed Flash Player 10 beta 2 in
safari and firefox - osx
internet explorer and firefox - windows xp
I then ran GUIMARK in each environment.
Even with Flash Player 10 beta 2, the performance under OSX is approximately half that of Windows XP. It is approximately 28fps under OSX and around 58fps under Windows XP.
So even the very latest version of Flash Player 10 under OSX is about half the speed of Windows!
The frustrating thing is that Adobe has not given any clear reason to account for the lack of performance.
Another puzzling thing is that Adobe is now saying that the text rendering has been very slow in the past, it has now identified the bottleneck and fixed it. But why has this bottleneck taken so long to find? The implication seems to be that no-one at Adobe has even tried to sort out the performance problems by profiling the code.
So with no explanation for the dramatic difference in speed on the same hardware under different operating systems, it is beginning to look like Adobe not only does not know why there is such a dramatic speed difference, but it has never made the effort to find out.
So Adobe - any answers as to why OSX is STILL so slow, or has no one done the work to identify the problem?
DD
Duke,
"It is approximately 28fps under OSX and around 58fps under Windows XP."
Please read my comment on the GUIMark site. I was very clear about why there is still a difference. The standalone player is only about 10-20% slower than the windows version with this specific benchmark.
This rest can be attributed to gcc. Even Apple has had finally enough and is starting to develop a replacement based on LLVM: http://developer.apple.com/releasenotes/DeveloperTools/RN-llvm-gcc/index.html (I said starting, this is not even close to being production ready)
"But why has this bottleneck taken so long to find?"
Because this benchmark hits a very specific area in the player which can't be seen with real content. GUIMark is a benchmark, not real content.
For the record I, other developers and QE run Shark and other performance tools, manually and automated. All the time.
Hi Tinic!
I'm looking forward to Flash Player 10 and I think that the your adressed the most urgent issues in this release: Text, 3D, more Expressiveness, unloadAndStop().
Great that astro finally gets a good text enging with bidi text.
But: Arabic Keyboard input not working!
However, this is of little use if we can not use the text feature interactively. This means, we have to able to capture keyboard input from an arabic keyboard layout.
On an arabic keyboard layout (101, see http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/reference/keyboards.mspx), the key that's „A“ on an english keyboard is the letter „sheen“, \u0634.
However, capturing this key with a Keyboard Event gets the follwoing value:
e.keyCode = 65
e.charCode = 65 („a“) - with Shift Key down, it's 65 („A“)
On a mac OS X 10.5.4 it's even worse (when Using the „Arabic“ keyboard layout):
e.keyCode = 52 - with Shift Key down, it's 171
e.charCode = 52 („4“) - with Shift Key down, it's 171 („A“)
I consider the behaviour on the mac a serious bug:
- Why does the keyCode change with the shift key?
- Why is it different than on the PC.
But the main question is: how can we get Flash Player 10 to get the correct unicode code point, e.g. \u0634 für „Sheen“.
We can not even make a manual conversion because
- we do not know the selected keyboard layout
- we get corrupted keyCodes and charCodes on the Mac (not even the Latin ones!)
The Arabic Market is very important, and we need to make fully localized RIAs! (Btw, the same will be true for hebrew, I guess.)
If we can not use the new international text features interactively, we could also use PDF or a GIF creator, so I think even if the Beta is near the end, this should be very high priority!
What's your thoughs on all this? Am I missing something?
- David
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