Adobe Flash Player labeled Shockwave Flash in and is for using content created on the platform, including viewing contents, executing , and. Flash Player can run from a as a browser or on supported mobile devices. Flash Player was created by and has been developed and distributed by since Adobe acquired Macromedia. Adobe Flash Player Initial release January 1, 1996 ; 22 years ago 1996-01-01 Windows, macOS, Linux, Chrome OS 31. Flash Player supports , , embedded audio, video and , and a scripting language called. ActionScript is based on similar to and supports. Flash Player is distributed free of charge and its plug-in versions are available for every major web browser and operating system. Flash Player once had a large user base, and was a common format for , animations, and GUI elements embedded in web pages. Adobe stated in 2013 that more than 400 million out of over 1 billion connected desktops update to the new version of Flash Player within six weeks of release. Flash Player has become increasingly criticized for its performance, consumption of battery on mobile devices, the number of that had been discovered in the software, and its nature. Its usage has also waned because of modern that allow some of Flash's use cases to be fulfilled without third-party plugins. In July 2017, Adobe announced that it would end support for Flash Player in 2020, and continued to encourage the use of open standards in place of Flash. The announcement was coordinated with , , , , and. Adobe Flash Player is a runtime that executes and displays content from a provided file, although it has no in-built features to modify the SWF file at runtime. It can execute software written in the programming language which enables the runtime manipulation of text, data, , , and. The player can also access certain connected hardware devices, including and , after permission for the same has been granted by the user. Flash Player is used internally by the AIR , to provide a cross-platform runtime environment for and mobile applications. AIR supports installable applications on , , , and some mobile operating systems such as and. Data formats Flash Player includes native support for many , some of which can only be accessed through the scripting interface. XML data is held in memory as an XML , and can be manipulated using ActionScript. ActionScript 3 also supports E4X , which allows XML data to be manipulated more easily. Flash Player can also read and write files in the , the default data format for Local Shared Objects. Since the AMF format specification is published, data can be transferred to and from Flash applications using AMF datasets instead of or , reducing the need for and such data. The SWX system stores data as standard SWF bytecode which is automatically interpreted by Flash Player. Multimedia formats Flash Player is primarily a graphics and multimedia platform, and has supported and since its earliest version. It supports the following different multimedia formats which it can natively and playback. MP3 files can be accessed and played back from a server via , or embedded inside an SWF file, which is also a streaming format. Flash Video is only a container format and supports multiple different video , such as , and more recently. Flash Player uses hardware acceleration to display video where present, using technologies such as and to do so. Flash Video is used by , , , and other news providers. FLV files can be played back from a server using , and can also be embedded inside an SWF file. Flash Video can also be streamed via using the or other such server-side software. Flash Player 11 can also encode a PNG bitmap via ActionScript. Flash Player 10 added support for the advanced image compression standard developed by , which results in better compression and quality than JPEG. JPEG-XR enables and compression with or without transparency. Flash Player 11 can also encode a JPEG or JPEG-XR bitmap via ActionScript. Loading a multi-frame GIF will display only the first image frame. However, only websites that explicitly allow Flash to connect to them can be accessed via HTTP or , to prevent Flash being used as a tool for , , and. Websites must host a certain XML file termed a cross domain policy, allowing or denying Flash content from specific websites to connect to them. Certain websites, such as , , already host a cross domain policy that permits Flash content to access their website via HTTP. RTMP supports a non-encrypted version over the TCP or an encrypted version over a secure SSL connection. RTMPT can also be within requests to traverse that only allow HTTP traffic. Sockets can be used only via , and can transfer , or binary data ActionScript 3. To prevent security issues, web servers that permit Flash content to communicate with them using sockets must host an -based cross domain policy file, served on 843. Sockets enable AS3 programs to interface with any kind of server software, such as. Performance Hardware acceleration Until version 10 of the Flash player, there was no support for acceleration. Version 10 added a limited form of support for on materials in the form of the API, but still did not have GPU-accelerated 3D vertex processing. A significant change came in version 11, which added a new low-level API called initially codenamed Molehill , which provides full GPU acceleration, similar to. The partial support for GPU acceleration in Pixel Bender was completely removed in Flash 11. Current versions of Flash Player are optimized to use for video playback and 3D graphics rendering on many devices, including desktop computers. Performance is similar to playback. Also, Flash Player has been used on multiple mobile devices as a primary user interface renderer. Compilation Although code written in ActionScript 3 executes up to 10 times faster than the prior ActionScript 2, the Adobe ActionScript 3 compiler is a non-, and produces inefficient bytecode in the resulting SWF, when compared to toolkits such as. Adobe has released ActionScript Compiler 2 ASC2 in Flex 4. As of 2012, the multiplatform language can build programs for Flash Player that perform faster than the same application built with the Adobe Flex SDK compiler. Startup time is reduced since the Flex framework must be downloaded before the application begins, and weighs in at approximately 500 KB. Video games built for Flash Player are typically pure-Actionscript projects. Various open-source component frameworks are available for pure ActionScript projects, such as MadComponents, that provide UI Components at significantly smaller SWF file sizes. In both methods, developers can access the full Flash Player set of functions, including , , graphics, , , camera, microphone, and others. AIR also includes added features such as file system integration, native extensions, native desktop integration, and hardware integration with connected devices. Before the introduction of Stage3D, a number of older 2D engines or isometric engines like saw their heyday. Notable online video games developed in Flash include , and 2, and started in 2002, and still active as of 2011. Desktop platforms The latest version of Flash Player is available for and later, and later and. This plugin cannot be installed on and later, because these OSes come with their own integrated Flash Player ActiveX. This plugin cannot be installed on Google Chrome as it comes with its own built-in Flash component. On February 22, 2012, Adobe announced that it would no longer release new versions of NPAPI Flash plugins for Linux, although Flash Player 11. In August 2016 Adobe announced that, beginning with version 24, it will resume offering of Flash Player for Linux for other browsers. The Extended Support Release ESR of Flash Player on macOS and Windows was a version of Flash Player kept up to date with security updates, but none of the new features or bug fixes available in later versions. It has been on version 11. Adobe has decided to discontinue the ESR branch and instead focus solely on the standard release as of August 2016. Availability on Latest stable version Support status and later, and later Current stable version: 31. Old version, no longer supported: 11. Mobile platforms Main article: In 2011, Flash Player had emerged as the de facto standard for online video publishing on the desktop, with adaptive bitrate video streaming, , and fullscreen support. On mobile devices however, after refused to allow the Flash Player within the inbuilt web browser, Adobe changed strategy, enabling Flash content to be delivered as native mobile applications using the. Up until 2012, Flash Player 11 was available for the ARM Cortex-A8 and above , alt
