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Apple Technology

Adobe Releases Flash 11 and AIR 3 174

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the is-this-what-death-sounds-like dept.
iamrmani writes "Software maker Adobe Systems has launched Flash Player 11 and Adobe AIR 3 even as the industry is shifting to HTML 5 on the Web that lessens the reliance of developers on Flash." The Register has a bit more to say about Adobe's repositioning of Flash for games as a competetive strategy.
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Adobe Releases Flash 11 and AIR 3 More

Adobe Releases Flash 11 and AIR 3

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  • I like how the author (Score:3, Insightful)

    by jtgarris ( 2434500 ) on Wednesday September 21, 2011 @12:28PM (#37469584)
    is surprised that Adobe would keep releasing products as people start relying on them less. How else are they going to compete.
    • Maybe they are going to buy up some really cheap Borders Books franchises.
    • By suing the W3C claiming that they violated look-and-feel patents? *ducks*

    • Re:I like how the author (Score:5, Insightful)

      by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Wednesday September 21, 2011 @01:45PM (#37470478) Journal
      They're not going to compete. HTML5 competes with the Flash plugin. This is not a revenue generator for Adobe, it's a thing that the give away to try to persuade people to buy their authoring tools. As it becomes well supported, Adobe can transition the developer tools over to targeting HTML5 as well as, then instead of, the Flash plugin. Long term, they stop having to develop Flash (which costs them money) and get to keep selling the authoring tools. What's not to like?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by garote ( 682822 )

        Stiffer competition in the authoring tools sector, since HTML5 is an open standard, and Flash is(was) not.

        Better to continue redefining Flash as "what you use when HTML5 won't cut it". And for 3D games, HTML5 won't cut it.

      • What's not to like?

        The lack of vendor lock-in/uneven playing field that being the vendor of the target player and the main dev tools gave them? With HTML5 they can longer be ahead of their dev tools competitors by fiddling the target.

    • I'm not actually seeing a decrease in usage on the desktop of Flash tho - HTML5 uptake seems to be great on mobile platforms (generally because there is no alternative with IOS), but Youtube et al still serve me Flash even when I'm on a HTML5 capable browser... (and no, the opt-in trial does not count).

      Plus of course there is still things in the video arena that Flash still does better than HTML5.

    • Let's not forget that there still is no such thing as a final HTMLv5. As much as I like to see it die sooner than later, no HTMLv5 'app' is working on all 'HTMLv5' browsers yet, while Flash delivers consistancy.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Pieroxy ( 222434 )

        consistancy

        Painful, crappy, buggy, slow, PITA to integrate in a web page, not indexable by search engines, the list is long. And it is consistent. I didn't like it 10 years ago, I like it no more and no less today.

        As far as a final HTMLv5, where have you been in the past 10 years? W3C propose a draft, browsers go ahead, standards are frozen later on. If only MS had the kindness of not making browsers anymore, things would go well. Now, in almost all browsers you have client side storage, canvas, css3 to a large extent

        • It took Flash to get to this point of HTML being able to do something not layout, but animated and interactive content.

          The real question would be "Where the hell was W3C in the last 10 years?

          Sure they did a little something-something here and there, and even though Flash is a bitch, Flash delivered something that was way ahead of its time. I mean; why the hell has it took a Duke Nukem Forever release in development time to get to the point where we are starting to see the apearence of a video tag? I mean...

  • Noooooooooo!!!!! (Score:3, Funny)

    by MightyMartian ( 840721 ) on Wednesday September 21, 2011 @12:29PM (#37469596) Journal

    I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.

    • Are you also looking forward to doing some flash upgrades, and then another round when the inevitable security issues are eventually patched?
  • Why is this story tagged under Apple?

  • Adobe is positioning their Flash-based platforms to be a platform for mature applications instead of widgets and applets.

    I wonder if Microsoft will expose the new WinRT API to Flash or AIR?

  • bias? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ThorGod ( 456163 ) on Wednesday September 21, 2011 @12:37PM (#37469706) Journal

    The launch comes at a time when the industry is shifting from Flash and embracing HTML 5 on the Web that lessens the reliance of developers on Flash. HTML5 is gaining momentum each day as tech giants such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook are supporting it.

    To what extent is this true and to what extent is it bullying? I mean, "oh damn the competition just wont go away! even though it can't possibly win!". That's what those sentences sound like to me.

    a.) In a capitalistic society, believe it or not, competition is great! It's one of the few things that enforces sane prices and wages, and has the benefit of not being decreed by a government regulator.
    b.) Even if a technology is inferior and/or 'old' doesn't mean it's going away. Fortran, anyone?

    • Except most sane, security, stability, and privacy conscious people want Flash to die a quick and painless death. HTML 5 offers better performance, better security, and better privacy controls (at least in theory) because it depends solely on the browser. A secure browser = secure HTML 5. No matter how good the browser, it cannot control Flash except to disable it. Therefore, competition would be good, if Flash and HTML 5 were equal. They are not.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ThorGod ( 456163 )

        Competition is rarely between equal parties.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by 0123456 ( 636235 )

        HTML 5 offers better performance, better security, and better privacy controls (at least in theory) because it depends solely on the browser.

        Flash runs in a separate process on Linux and I have that wrapped in Apparmor so it can't access anything other than the few files it needs to operate. If I hit Flash malware, it can't write to any file on my system that isn't specifically Flash-related, nor can it read files that contain private information.

        An HTML5 exploit in Firefox means it can access pretty much anything and can certainly grab bank passwords or some other crap that I really, really do not want to happen.

        • Good for you. However, malware tends to rely not on hitting individuals, but on hitting large groups. I very, very much doubt people are writing Flash malware to target Linux, or for that matter that you visit many sites which would expose you to malware. I trust Firefox (well, Opera in my case) to block malware much more than I trust Adobe. And plugins just add one more possibility for malware. With a browser you only have one possible vector, with Flash you get two.

      • HTML 5 offers better performance

        If SVG animation or canvas animation offers better performance than Flash animation, then why hasn't an alternative to Newgrounds for SVG or canvas cartoons emerged?

        • Probably because of compatibility, or rather lack thereof. IE 8 for one doesn't support SVG at all, and every other browser seems to support different parts of the specs. HTML 5 isn't finished yet.
          • Then how can flash be eliminated immediately.. answer (likely at least 4 years out before we can count out IE8). Not that I really like it, and at my current position it's not even a concerted effort for the projects I have in the pot. I've added a special class to the html tag (along with other browser classes) that includes .ieold (any version prior to 9), even if ie9 has a lot of issues wrt CSS3. Looks like IE10 may finally be caught up (so to speak). I can only hope that MS goes closer to the chrome

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by afabbro ( 33948 )

            HTML 5 isn't finished yet.

            Only three more years to go! [wikipedia.org]

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        Flash really only started getting good after iPhone came out. Flash lite sucked balls, and full Flash itself ran terrible on mobile devices prior to this (and even for a period after the iPhone came out). And nevermind that installing FlashBlock was essential to prevent your PC from slowing to a crawl when browsing the web.

        Now we have hardware accellerated video decoding, full flash on mobile devices that actually runs half-decently, etc.

        • Flash really only started getting good after iPhone came out. Flash lite sucked balls, and full Flash itself ran terrible on mobile devices prior to this (and even for a period after the iPhone came out).

          What on Earth are you on about?

          I can even watch homestarrunner.com (the ubiquitous example) toons on my old Windows Mobile 5 device with a 200MHz OMAP thing, and it plays back smoothly.

          Now we have hardware accellerated video decoding, full flash on mobile devices that actually runs half-decently

          Oh, you're

      • Painless? Hells no, I want it to be dragged along the road for about a mile, then dipped in tar and set alight before finally being dumped over a cliff into the ocean.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Bert64 ( 520050 )

        The best part about html is that it is open, and as such will be implemented independently by all the major browser makers...
        This is in contrast to flash, where there is generally only one implementation, making any security holes in it extremely attractive indeed. This is made even worse by the fact that this implementation is extremely slow/buggy especially on non windows platforms, wont be fixed by its vendor and cannot be fixed by anyone else due to being closed source.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by edremy ( 36408 )
          The worst part about html is that it is open, and as such will be implemented independently by all the major browser makers...

          This is in contrast to flash, where there is generally only one implementation, making scripts actually portable from device to device. This is made even worse by the fact that HTML implementations are being developed by a series of companies that all think they should be in charge of what HTML is, especially on non-windows platforms, resulting in incompatibilities that won't be fixe

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Toonol ( 1057698 )
        HTML 5 offers better performance, better security, and better privacy controls (at least in theory) .

        The others, maybe... but better performance? All current implementation must be pretty far off of their theoretical performance, then, because HTML5 is nowhere near flash right now in terms of speed.

  • No. It is not released! (Score:5, Informative)

    by gQuigs ( 913879 ) on Wednesday September 21, 2011 @12:47PM (#37469826) Homepage

    From the article:
    "Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 are scheduled for release in early October. Adobe didn't give the date, but you should expect release at Adobe's annual Max conference, between 1 and 5 October."

    No comment.

  • ... on it's security-hole-riddled history, javascript in the browser (XSS) is also a favorite attack vector. But at least it is a little less black-boxish.

    For security sake, maybe we should just go back to punch cards!?!?!?

  • As long as content creators support Flash, it will still exist. Newgrounds [newgrounds.com], as an example, still has a large community of flash artists and programmers, which regularly provide animations and games for free.

    When these sites make the transition, Flash may die. Until then, it may be used significantly less, but it will still be there.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • This looks more like an Announcement than a Release. The bits won't be available for download until October. However, there was a new version of Flash Player 10 released today (10.3.183.10) that resolves a cross-site scripting issue.
    • Ditto what parent posters have said ... but does appear that the latest 10.x release runs on 64-bit Windoze ... FINALLY Adobe!!!

  • Without question, Flash has it's issues. However, as good as HTML5 may be I still think Flash is superior. It's relatively easy to build something robust and cross platform consistency is a non-issue. Build something in Flash and you know it's going to look identical in Windows, OSX and Linux. Wasn't there that interactive site for a band recently mentioned on Slashdot that ran only in Chrome? That's HTML5.

    And performance, especially with graphics, is unquestionably superior in Flash than it is in HTML5. I'

    • Flash is a closed "standard", and the binary is only available for a couple of platforms. For example, there is no version for Linux on PPC. There are limited, old versions for some ARM Linux platforms, so it doesn't in fact look identical there. When it comes to updating these, you are at Adobe's mercy, or you can just compile the latest Firefox because it is Free software.

      • Flash is a closed "standard", and the binary is only available for a couple of platforms.

        The "couple" of platforms that make up the majority of devices in the market: Linux, Windows, Linux ARM, QNX ARM, and iOS (ARM too? I don't actually know). I'm not sure if the ARM platforms I'm aware of are somehow different from the "old" ones you're referring to; but Flash functions on modern ARM just fine, with no difference between that platform and x86.

        For example, there is no version for Linux on PPC.

        And the thirteen people who run Linux on PPC are probably grateful.

        There are limited, old versions for some ARM Linux platforms, so it doesn't in fact look identical there. When it comes to updating these, you are at Adobe's mercy, or you can just compile the latest Firefox because it is Free software.

        If you're willing to compile the latest firefox (and you make it sound like it would

  • We have prenotification of Flash security holes being exploited in the wild:

    http://blogs.adobe.com/psirt/2011/09/prenotification-security-update-for-flash-player.html [adobe.com]

    Flash is a mess with dubious value. A new version doesn't fix that.

  • Of course the OP didn't bother to actually link to the real product announcement, instead just to some site slagging Flash. If any of you are under the impression that Flash is going away just because it wont be used for banner ads or video.. Just take a look at the type of 3D games that are currently being developed in Flash: http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplatform/ [adobe.com] Tell me with a straight face that people will be doing games like that in html the near future. I just don't get the hate.. each technology ha

  • Am I really the only person who is not looking forward to HTML5 taking over in that every ad on the internet will be some sort of flashy HTML5 element that can't be easily removed without breaking the rest of the webpage?

    Not that I think Flash is going anywhere soon. There will always be a big place for Flash on the internet in the foreseeable future.

  • Flash 11, because it took 11 years... (Score:3)

    by thsths ( 31372 ) on Wednesday September 21, 2011 @02:21PM (#37470924)

    ... to finally get 64bit support? Although I have to say a few years ago, when I started running Ubuntu amd64, it would have been more useful. Nowadays there are a number of decent workarounds, Google Chrome being one of them, npviewer another.

  • A Debug version for us, low life, scum of the earth, lousy dirt bag, developers? Please?

  • Remember them? They gave away a 'free' plugin that let you view streaming video. The server software was the moneymaker and the 'free' plugin was the hook. Hopefully, flash will be the same forgotten status in a year or so, lost in the sea of open-sourced options.

  • >"Software maker Adobe Systems has launched Flash Player 11"

    Correction:

    "Software maker Adobe Systems has launched Flash Player 11 but only for MS-Windows."

    Download Adobe Flash Player
    Adobe Flash Player version 10.3.183.10
    Your system: Linux, Firefox

    Download Adobe Flash Player
    Adobe Flash Player version 10.3
    Your system: MacOS 10.4-10.7

    • Let me correct my above posting.... I went back and told it I wanted it for MS-Windows and it also said 10.3. So perhaps it "introduced" but not available for download on ANY platform yet.

      I apologize (I do wish it were possible to correct or delete postings, oh well, my bad)

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