Yesterday Adobe announced the availability of “Square” – their native 64-bit Flash Player for all major desktop operating systems including Windows, Mac and Linux.
As well as the native 64-bit support, Adobe has been collaborating with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team to take advantage of the hardware-accelerated graphics capabilities in the newest version of IE. Apparently Adobe’s engineers have seen the Flash Player performance improve by over 35% compared to Flash Player running in previous versions of IE.
Expect to find the greatest performance benefits when using bitmap heavy content. Flash content embedded as transparent (wmode=”transparent”) will also run more efficiently with the HTML and Flash composition being offloaded to the GPU.
It’s currently in beta but if you are using a 64-bit browser and would like to test your existing Flash content for compatibility and stability then head over to Adobe Labs.
I’m glad Adobe continued development for this, after announcing that they were dropping 64 bit support on Linux earlier in the year.