The application also supports SWF format, used by programs like Adobe Flash or Flex. Interactive animations, games, flash documents, videos or music are just a few examples of the type of content you'll have access to with Adobe Flash Player. So, why the weak-sounding 10.Adobe Flash Player is an application that lets you watch multimedia content developed in Flash in a wide range of web browsers. This is obviously a huge release for Adobe, as it comes at a time when the company is under attack for its platform's pitfalls. Multi-touch capability isn't likely to change Apple's mind about inviting Flash to the table, but this feature will be a huge boon to those Android tablets that are supposed to be showing up any day now to kill the iPad. However, Flash Player 10.1 does support multi-touch input surfaces, one of Steve Jobs' sticking points in his ' Thoughts on Flash' essay about why Apple isn't supporting the technology. But Adobe has pledged support for WebM in Flash Player, so hopefully we'll see it sooner rather than later. There's no mention here of support for the new WebM video format, which Google, Opera and Mozilla launched last month to serve as an open alternative to H.264. There's also a new buffering system, so you can pause, rewind and fast-forward streaming video just like you're watching it on a DVR (as long as the provider is allowing for it).

There are a raft of video improvements – we get hardware-accelerated H.264 video decoding, better HTTP streaming that supports dynamic bitrates for live video streams, and support for peer-assisted video streams (aka 'Multicasting'). On the security front, the new Flash Player will fully honor the rules of your browser's private browsing mode by not caching any data on the local system while private browsing is enabled. Mac users will also notice a significant improvement, as the Flash team says it has paid particular attention to Mac OS X and Safari issues in this release. These enhancements should prevent nasty problems like Flash Player causing your browser to crash or your entire OS to freeze, which is usually the result of more Flash than your computer can handle at once – something netbook owners know all too well.

Adobe flash player 10.1 for mac