Adobe Flash Player 9

Product Man­ager Emmy Huang writes in the Adobe Devel­op­ment Center:

As we looked at our goals for Flash Player 9, how­ever, we real­ized that it would be too lim­it­ing to con­tinue to evolve the exist­ing engine. We wanted to create a water­shed moment in the his­tory of Flash Player, and to deliver it we needed to be able to inno­vate with­out constraint.

As a result, Action­Script 3.0 is essen­tially a full rewrite of the Action­Script engine. Action­Script 3.0 exe­cutes in a new, highly-​optimized vir­tual machine known as AVM2, which we built for effi­ciency and per­for­mance. Although AVM2 will be the pri­mary vir­tual machine for Action­Script exe­cu­tion going for­ward, Flash Player will con­tinue to sup­port the older AVM1 for back­wards com­pat­i­bil­ity with exist­ing and legacy content.

How­ever, in order to take advan­tage of the new fea­tures, we’ll have to wait for the release of Flash Pro­fes­sional 9, (or play around with an alpha patch for Flash 8), accord­ing to the FAQ:

Design­ers and devel­op­ers inter­ested in using new Flash Player 9 fea­tures are wel­come to explore the public alpha of Adobe Flash Pro­fes­sional 9 Action­Script 3.0 avail­able on Adobe Labs.

It’s curi­ously timed… isn’t it unprece­dented for Macromedia/Adobe releas­ing Player 9 almost a year in advance of Flash Pro­fes­sional 9? And, I don’t think that we’ll see wide-​spread adop­tion until there is actu­ally some Flash 9 con­tent out there on the web. I’ll start paying atten­tion in 2007.

• Down­load Flash Player 9
• Flash Pro­fes­sional 9 Action­Script 3.0 Preview