Adobe Flash Player

Adobe Flash Player

Adobe Flash Player is the standard for delivering high-impact, rich Web content. Designs, animation, and application user interfaces are deployed immediately across all browsers and platforms, attracting and engaging users with a rich Web experience.

Adobe Flash Player (labeled Shockwave Flash in Internet Explorer and Firefox) is freeware software for using content created on the Adobe Flash platform, including viewing multimedia, executing rich Internet applications, and streaming video and audio. Flash Player can run from a web browser as a browser plug-in or on supported mobile devices. Flash Player was created by Macromedia and has been developed and distributed by Adobe Systems since Adobe acquired Macromedia.

Flash Player has a wide user base, and is a common format for games, animations, and graphical user interfaces (GUIs) embedded in web pages. Adobe states that more than 400 million out of more than 1 billion connected desktops update to the new version of Flash Player within six weeks of release.

Flash Player can be downloaded for free and its plug-in version is available for every major web browser. Google Chrome comes bundled with the sandboxed Adobe Flash plug-in and will continue to support the plug-in in Windows 8 Metro mode.

Flash Player runs SWF files that can be created by the Adobe Animate authoring tool, by Adobe Flash Builder or by third party tools such as FlashDevelop. Flash Player supports vector and raster graphics, 3D graphics, an embedded scripting language called ActionScript, and streaming of video and audio. ActionScript is based on ECMAScript, and supports object-oriented code, and is similar to JavaScript.


Features
Adobe Flash Player is a runtime that executes and displays content from a provided SWF file, although it has no in-built features to modify the SWF file at runtime. It can execute software written in the ActionScript programming language which enables the runtime manipulation of text, data, vector graphics, raster graphics, sound and video. The player can also access certain connected hardware devices, including web cameras and microphones, after permission for the same has been granted by the user.

Flash Player is used internally by the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), to provide a cross-platform runtime environment for desktop applications and mobile applications. AIR supports installable applications on Windows, Linux, OS X, and some mobile operating systems such as iOS and Android. Flash applications must specifically be built for the AIR runtime to use additional features provided, such as file system integration, native client extensions, native window/screen integration, taskbar/dock integration, and hardware integration with connected Accelerometer and GPS devices.


Usability
In some browsers, prior Flash versions have had to be uninstalled before an updated version could be installed. However, as of version 11.2 for Windows, there are now automatic updater options. Linux is partially supported, as Adobe is cooperating with Google to implement it via Chrome web browser on all Linux platforms.

Mixing Flash applications with HTML leads to inconsistent behavior with respect to input handling (keyboard and mouse not working as they would in an HTML-only document). This is often done in web sites and can lead to poor user experience with the site.

The February 20, 2014 update to 12.0.0.70 introduced a reported bug, producing green video with sound only. This defect is related to hardware acceleration and may be overcome by disabling hardware acceleration via the Adobe settings in Firefox (accessed by right clicking within the video) or in Internet Explorer (within the Tools settings). This defect may be related to widely used graphics hardware, AMD Radeon HD video cards, and similar visual defects have occurred in earlier Flash updates, with the same workaround.