Adobe unfurls Flash 10.3 beta

Adobe has released a beta of Flash Player 10.3 that – among other new niceties – includes a preferences pane for managing your storage, camera, playback, and other settings. Previously, users needed to access an Adobe-hosted settings webpage to control preferences for global and website privacy and storage, security, protected …

[Anonymous Coward]

Subtle dig?

I like the nice touch of demonstrating this on an apple...well known for their support of the Flash platform.

Yeah, yeah, only the mobile hardware etc etc, but you've gotta admit it's a wee bit delicious...

[Anonymous Coward]

Adobe finally pulls its finger out

It's only taken 5-6 years to make a preference panel that looks like it belongs on the Mac OS. If they keep improving at that rate, I might think about removing ClickToFlash in about a decade.

[Ilgaz]

How was auto update implemented?

Both Windows and OS X, naturally Linux have their system wide schedulers which isn't rocket science to setup.

For example, Apple, who isn't the best windows coder implements apple software update using windows scheduled tasks.

I mean, hopefully adobe doesn't add another thing to resident updater junk which is already overloaded. Also because of the huge install base, its exploits will be on black market. In case it stupidly runs 24/7

[Dan 55]

Hallelujah

Now all we need is an installer which installs both NPAPI and ActiveX versions at the same time on Windows and an uninstaller which uninstalls all versions of Flash wherever they may be as its moved about over the years.

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't fault Adobe's recent work on OS X

the prefpane is an unexpected bonus, and most welcome

[DrXym]

That prefs dialog was evil

Flash had the most ugly prefs configuration going, and from a privacy standpoint it was terrible. I hope by moving stuff client side that it's easier to control.

[Anonymous Coward]

As (n)ever was

Those prefs have been available by control-clicking (Mac) on a Flash pane. Granted, they were tiny and hard to deal with, but they were there...

[Anonymous Coward]

Are these preferences scriptable as part of the install?

Or at least a config file that can be copied over after the install?

Since in a mass deployment, I don't want to rely on users to do things like turn off auto update checks.

[jonathanb]

64 bit support?

Does it have it? Or is that asking for too much?

[Russell Howe]

Re: 64 bit support?

On Linux for ages (*) :)

* for small values of "ages"

[Anonymous Coward]

* and certain values of "support"

From Adobe's page:

"When will Adobe Flash Player support 64-bit operating systems and browsers?

Flash Player 10.3 will not have 64-bit support. Support for 64-bit operating systems and web browsers on Linux, Mac OS, and Windows is currently available in the Flash Player "Square" preview release on Adobe Labs. Developers can use the "Square" preview with the current Microsoft® Internet Explorer® 9 beta. Availability of 64-bit support in a publically available release for consumers will be announced at a later date."

The latest "square" release is pre-10.2 and doesn't seem to get security updates like the full releases.

[Anton Ivanov]

Cough, cough

About:plugins

Shockwave Flash

File name: libflashplayer.so

Shockwave Flash 10.3 d162

uname -a

Linux falkor 2.6.32-5-amd64 #1 SMP Wed Jan 12 03:40:32 UTC 2011 x86_64 GNU/Linux

cat /etc/debian_version

6.0

[Anton Ivanov]

More interesting questions

Does it have video hardware acceleration on Linux and what API does it use.

[Baskitcaise]

More interesting questions

As far as I can gather linux hardware accel is limited still to vdpau + nvidia, check phoronix for more info they did a page yesterday about it.

[Anton Ivanov]

Answering myself (dug it out from their revision notes)

Nvidia and Set Top Box chipsets.

The former is an obvious choice - it works. I would really like the day when ATI drivers work, but it is not really there. I have two laptops and a desktop with Radeons inside and they all are rather wobbly.

The latter choice (STB - Broadcom ClearHD) is a more interesting one. We may be heading to a "flash everywhere" world after all regardless of the resistance by some manufacturers, cough, cough...

[ColonelClaw]

Now it's all out in the open...

...that's a scary amount of stuff Flash was doing behind my back.

[Silly Brit]

Never mind the window dressing, can we have the 64bit version?

Mostly extras that we could have done without for a little while longer.

Why don't they actually finish the 64bit version they said they announced they were 'working on' back in about 2008?

[Anonymous Coward]

What about stability (still utterly dire) and what about accessibility (non-existent)?

Is this version able to support Accessibility features (e.g. Voiceover on OS X) on anything other than Windows yet? And is there any move towards actually making this POS remotely stable on OS X? Or is it continued FAIL as always?