Adobe ships Flash Player 10.1 with hardware acceleration


Thursday company released an anticipated Mac OS update to the company's multimedia plugin.

While the update offers a lot of new features across the board, Flash Player 10.1 should be of particular interest for Mac users. The upgrade promises significant performance improvements, with the biggest improvements go to the Mac. The combination of overall and Mac specific performance improvements should help with complaints of excessive CPU usage. For Mac OS X 10.6 users, Flash now utilized hardware-based acceleration. Adobe said this should result in dramatically improved Web page displays that combine Flash elements and HTML. [Update: For clarification note that this release does not provide h.264 hardware acceleration for video playback. Hardware support is in this release is limited to Core Animation. H.264 acceleration is slated for an upcoming release.)

The plugin is also now a full Cocoa application, complete with Cocoa user interface elements for dialog boxes.The system also takes advantage of Mac OS X's Core Animation, Core Audio, Core Graphics, and Core Foundation for improved rendering, sound, printing, and text support.

Adobe Flash Player is available for free and works with all major Mac browsers.

Flash Player 10.1