Adobe Flash Player 10.1 has been released

Adobe published the final version of Flash Player 10.1 on its website, you can grab the download over here. The new Flash version promises enhanced performance (including GPU acceleration), better power management, video improvements, and new multi-touch and private browsing capabilities. Moreover, the company has also focused on delivering many improvements for Macs, a full list of changes can be found over here.

Performance and Power Management With Flash Player 10.1 we aligned our development efforts to create a single runtime that works across desktops and devices. Performance and power efficiency was a huge focus since different devices have varying sized processors and memory, and we needed to ensure Flash Player 10.1 would work across all of them. So we made a number of changes to Flash Player that directly translate to faster execution and reduced resource consumption. We achieved some large gains in reducing the amount of memory used at runtime, particularly for bitmap-intensive apps. The ActionScript virtual machine received some targeted optimizations, which directly benefit typed AS3 code. And, our release wouldn't be complete if we didn't improve the garbage collector - where we tuned its behavior to run more efficiently and better amortize its processing over the application's lifetime.

As noted above, the team invested a lot of time in memory optimization. Tabbed browsing is common for PC users, who often have many pages open in their browser at the same time. This is a great timesaver but also uses up lots of RAM. With Flash Player 10.1, we added new functionality that detects when memory is running low. Now, content that runs in Flash Player will automatically shut down when the available memory is running low.

The Flash Player team made a number of improvements to conserve resources, reduce power usage and extend battery life. For example, Flash Player can now automatically reduce the power consumption for content running in the background on a non-visible browser tab to improve performance when users are multitasking. In cases where audio is playing in the background, playback fidelity is maintained.

Some significant changes were made to Flash Player 10.1 to re-architect the system for managing timers and events. Without going into the details here (Tinic Uro will share a post next week that covers this topic more comprehensively), the end result is that apps for Flash Player and Adobe AIR will use significantly less CPU when the content is idle and consume less power in the process. These improvements are most pronounced on Macs.