Release notes | Flash Player 10.1

Welcome to Adobe Flash Player 10.1 software! This document is for users developing content for Flash Player 10.1 and addresses issues that are not discussed in the Flash Professional or Flex documentation. This document may be updated periodically as more information becomes available.

System Requirements / Language Support

Versions of Adobe Flash Player

Installation and Uninstallation

New Features in Flash Player 10.1

Security Enhancements

Fixes in Flash Player 10.1

Fixes and improvements in Flash Player 10.1.82.76

Fixes and improvements in Flash Player 10.1.85.3

Fixes and improvements in Flash Player 10.1.102.64

Known issues

Other Resources for Learning About Flash Player

Reporting Bugs

For current Flash Player system requirements, visit http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/systemreqs/.

The Adobe Flash Player 10.1 release will be the last version to support Macintosh PowerPC-based G3 computers. Adobe will be discontinuing support of PowerPC-based G3 computers and will no longer provide security updates after the Flash Player 10.1 release. Support is being discontinued because of performance enhancements that cannot be supported on the older PowerPC architecture.

Flash Player 10.1 supports the following languages: Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish.

Adobe recommends that all Flash Player users on supported systems update to the most recent version of the player through the Flash Player Download Center.

Ensure that you have the latest version of Flash Player installed by clicking here to check the version you have installed and the latest shipping version for each platform.

The first public release of Flash Player 10.1 is version 10.1.53.64. Flash Player version 10.1.52.14.1 and 10.1.52.15 were included with initial release of Adobe Creative Suite® 5 and Flash Professional CS5. These builds were not deployed publicly to the Web. Users should update to the newest version of Flash Player 10.1 for content development and testing. Updated versions of the content debugger and other players are posted on the Flash Player Support Center Downloads page.

For Flash Player installation instructions, visit http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/productinfo/instructions/.

For uninstallation instructions, visit http://www.adobe.com/go/tn_14157.

Flash Player 10.1 is the first runtime release of the Open Screen Project™, which enables uncompromised Web browsing of expressive applications, content and video across devices. It contains several new features and enhancements:

• Support for new platforms
• Designed for mobility
• Developer productivity
• Enhanced browser integration
• Expanded options for high-quality media delivery

Flash Player 10.1 is available for a broad range of platforms, including netbooks and other Internet-connected devices, allowing your content to reach your customers virtually wherever they are. As with Flash Player 10, this release also supports Windows® 7 and Mac OS X 10.6 (“Snow Leopard”) desktop operating systems.

The consistent Flash Player browser-based runtime is the most productive way to deliver content to users across operating systems and devices. Runtime consistency helps reduce the cost of creating, testing and deploying content across different device, software, network, and user contexts, and helps improve business results.

To make it possible to deploy SWF content on smartphones and other mobile devices that have limited processing power and memory availability compared to PCs, a tremendous amount of work has gone into to making Flash Player 10.1 “ready for mobility”. This work includes performance improvements, such as rendering, scripting, memory, start-up time, battery and CPU optimizations, in addition to hardware acceleration of graphics and video. Improvements in memory utilization and management, start-up time, CPU usage, and rendering/scripting performance benefit PCs as well as mobile devices.

Multi-touch and gestures

Developers can take advantage of the latest hardware and operating system user interaction capabilities using new ActionScript® 3.0 APIs for multi-touch and native gesture events. Create multi-touch aware content for a wide range of devices as well as multi-touch capable PCs running Microsoft Windows 7. Interact with multiple objects simultaneously or work with native gestures, such as pinch, scroll, rotate, scale, and two-finger tap. (Adobe is actively working with its partners to enable multi-touch on additional desktop platforms.)

H.264 video hardware decoding

Flash Player 10.1 introduces hardware-based H.264 video decoding to deliver smooth, high quality video with minimal overhead across mobile devices and PCs. Using available hardware to decode video offloads tasks from the CPU, improving video playback performance, reducing system resource utilization, and preserving battery life.

Global error handler

The new Actionscript 3.0 global error handler enables developers to write a single handler to process all runtime errors that weren’t part of a try/catch statement. Improve application reliability and user experience by catching and handling unexpected runtime errors and present custom error messages. When using the global error handler in a SWF running in the debug player, error pop-ups will not be shown.

Globalization support

New ActionScript 3.0 globalization APIs allow Flash Player to use the values chosen in the operating system preferences to process text and lists and present information based on location context, without any knowledge of locale requirements. Choose a specific format independent of the currently selected locale on the operating system. Locale specific information and processing can include: date, time, currency and number formatting; currency and number parsing; string comparison for sorting or searching for text; and upper/lower case conversions.

Flash Player 10.1 offers enhanced conformance to consistent browser usability guidelines, helping to ensure optimized user experiences and improved user control over privacy.

Browser privacy mode (desktop only)

To help protect user privacy, Flash Player 10.1 adds support for the “private browsing” mode found in many web browsers. In private browsing mode, Flash Player will not save any information (local storage, or local shared objects) to a user’s computer. Since the browser also does not remember any history while in private browsing mode, this allows users to hide their activity from other users sharing the same machine. This feature is supported in Firefox, Chrome, and Internet Explorer. To learn more about private browsing, refer to this article.

Out-of-memory management

Flash Player 10.1 prevents resource-intensive content from depleting system memory by shutting down instances where a SWF attempts to allocate more memory than is available. When a SWF tries to allocate more memory than is available, Flash Player 10.1 adds logic to shut down Flash Player to prevent the browser from crashing. Users will receive notification to restart the SWF, or will see a notice to refresh the page if all instances must be shutdown.

Flash Player 10.1 includes a number of media quality of service improvements and is ready to take advantage of upcoming Adobe media servers that will provide new ways to deliver rich media experiences and create new business models. With new HTTP streaming and content protection features, premium audio and video content can be delivered within the browser more securely. Streaming performance is enhanced with improved support for live events, buffer control and peer assisted networking. 

Content protection (desktop only; output protection Windows only; requires Adobe Flash Access 2.0 SDK)

Media protected using the upcoming Adobe Flash Access 2.0 SDK can be played back securely in Flash Player 10.1 to support a wide range of business models, including video-on-demand, rental, and electronic sell-through, for streaming as well as download. Using industry-standard cryptography, Adobe Flash Access 2.0 and Flash Player 10.1 provides a robust environment to protect content so it remains safe from tampering or capture throughout its lifecycle. Flash Player 10.1 supports output protection on Windows, enabling content providers to specify requirements for protection of analog and digital outputs, providing additional safeguards against unauthorized recording. Note: Encrypted content cannot be hardware accelerated in this release of Flash Player.

Peer-assisted networking (requires “Stratus” on Adobe Labs, http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/stratus/)

The RTMFP protocol now supports groups, which enables an application to segment its users to send messages and data only between members of the group. Application level multicast provides one (or a few) -to-many streaming of continuous live video and audio live video chat using RTMFP groups.

HTTP streaming

HTTP streaming enables delivery of video-on-demand and live streaming using standard HTTP servers, or from HTTP servers at CDNs, leveraging standard HTTP infrastructure and SWF-level playback components. The addition of HTTP streaming will enable expanded protocol options to deliver live and recorded media to Flash Player, including full content protection for HTTP streamed video with Flash Access 2.0.

Stream reconnect (requires FMS 3.5.3 server)

Stream reconnect allows an RTMP stream to continue to play through the buffer even if the connection is disrupted, thereby making media experiences more tolerant of short term network failures and enabling non-disruptive video playback. When a connection is re-established the stream resumes playback. Developers can add re-connection logic in ActionScript to re-establish server connection and resume streaming without any disruption in the video.

Smart seek (requires FMS 3.5.3 server)

Smart seek allows you to seek within the buffer and introduces a new "back" buffer so you can easily rewind or fast forward video without going back to the server, reducing the start time after a seek. Smart seek can speed and improve the seeking performance of streamed videos and enable the creation of slow motion, double time, or “instant replay” experiences for streaming video.

Buffered stream catch-up

Buffered stream catch-up allows developers to set a target latency threshold that triggers slightly accelerated video playback to ensure that live video streaming stays in sync with real time over extended playback periods.

Fast switch (requires FMS 4 server)

The Dynamic Streaming capability introduced in Flash Player 10 and FMS 3.5 is enhanced to improve switching times between bitrates, reducing the time to receive the best content quality for available bandwidth and processing speed. Users no longer need to wait for the buffer to play through, resulting in a faster bitrate transition time and an uninterrupted video playback experience, regardless of bandwidth fluctuations.

Microphone access (desktop only)

Access binary data of the live and continuous waveform coming from the microphone to create new types of audio applications, such as audio recording for transcoding, karaoke, vocoder voice manipulation, sonographic analysis, pitch detection, and more.

 

Flash Player 10.1.53.64 includes security enhancements described in Security Bulletin APSB10-14.

Browser

• Opera and Netscape do not allow recursive calls using the ExternalInterface API into the Flash Player. This issue has been reported to Opera and Netscape. (184777)

Linux

• WMODE is disabled on displays with resolution bit-depths of 16. (234772)

A large number of additional issues were addressed during Flash Player 10.1 development. For the archived list of these fixes, see this TechNote.

Adobe Flash Player 10.1.82.76 includes security enhancements described in Security Bulletin APSB10-16.

Hardware accelerated video decoding is now available on Mac platforms running Mac OS X 10.6.3 and later on systems supported by the Apple Video Decode Acceleration framework.

Adobe Flash Player 10.1.85.3 includes security enhancements described in Security Bulletin APSB10-22.

Adobe Flash Player 10.1.102.64 includes security enhancements described in Security Bulletin APSB10-26.

General

• When an URL containing & or % is saved to a SharedObject file redirectSO.sol all of the parameters after these characters are stripped off. (1909140)

• CSS styles should not cascade across sandbox boundaries. (2261815)

• [FP-1760] Passing dates from Java to Flex causes 1 hour time difference. (2200268)

• startDrag and stopDrag do not work when the target is a 2D child of a 3D parent. (2200972)

• POST requests with no body reverting to GET. (2223288)

• XML.appendChild does not function correctly when published as SWF10; works fine as SWF9. (2340839)

• Behavior of Socket write methods is inconsistent on different platforms. (2580727)

• Last SWF Loaded sets scriptTimeLimit. (2500755)

• [FP-1569] AS3 Timeline: Child Sprite ADDED_TO_STAGE event is fired twice. (2300936)

• AS3 Timeline: First frame of Movie Clip animation played twice when created and added to stage with ActionScript. (2520095)

• [FP-4423] onEnterFrame gets called more often than necessary. (2614589)

• Automation APIs are only available on Windows and Android platforms. On unsupported platforms, runtime errors may appear when these APIs are called. 

• When searching for objects (not strings) in Dictionary objects using the 'in' operator, if the object is not found in the Dictionary object, it will be searched for in the delegate objects. With 10.1, the toString operator will be called on the Object if not found in the Dictionary. This can cause problems with Proxy objects who need to define the callProperty function or it will generate a RTE. A simple example that failed silently in 10.0 but throws an error in 10.1:

  • var p:Proxy = new Proxy();
  • var d:Dictionary = new Dictionary();
  • trace (p in d);
  • Error: Error #2090: The Proxy class does not implement callProperty. It must be overridden by a subclass. 
  • at Error$/throwError()
  • at flash.utils::Proxy/http://www.adobe.com/2006/actionscript/flash/proxy::callProperty() 
  • at Untitled_fla::MainTimeline/foo() // at Untitled_fla::MainTimeline/frame1() 

• When debugging projectors (stand alone player) on Mac, the dialog for connecting to the debugger has changed. A single "Connect to the Debugger" checkbox replaces the former "Don't connect" and "connect" buttons. The user can turn that checkbox on (if they want to connect when clicking the "Continue" button) or off (if they do not want to connect). "Continue" saves those settings. If the user wants to cancel out of that dialog altogether, they can click the red close dot in the top left of the dialog. (2479410) 

• When Out of Memory Handling is triggered in the Standalone Player, the Standalone Player simply exits without displaying an out of memory error. (2555713) 

• When you have a script that causes a time-out, the error that is generated by the debugger is different between AS2 and AS3. AS2 shows a script time-out error, while AS3 aborts the script and shows no error. (2570020) 

Audio/Video

• Some videos on Comedy Central and MTV sites may exhibit an intermittent echo or double-audio effect. This behavior seems to occur only in videos that include an introductory commercial. Refreshing the browser may alleviate the issue. We are working with MTV Networks to resolve this issue.

• For all supported Intel GPUs, we recommend using an Aero windows theme. Performance is significantly improved for fullscreen playback with Aero-enabled windows environments.

• The .f4v files created by AME CS5 cannot be called by onXMPData. (2603890)

• H.264 Video Hardware acceleration is not available for DRM-protected content on Broadcom graphics chips. 

• H.264 Video Hardware acceleration is not available on some Macintosh platforms. 

• With hardware video decoding on ATI chipsets, the fidelity range extension is not supported in H.264 encodings. (2463465) 

Text/Text Input

• [FP-1982] appendText when appending from another text field does not append in the correct location when the source string contains "\n". (2341522)

• Classic Text: Large font sizes are not drawing correctly on stage on in exported SWF Movies. (2483664)

• Scale text with Free Transform scales text incorrectly goes beyond text boundary and is cut off and too big. (2486588)

• [FP-2256] Text flows outside text field with advanced anti aliasing. (2447161)

Touch

• It is not possible to switch between gestures without removing fingers from screen. (2605522)

Content Protection/Output Protection

• Content Protection is not available on the following platforms: Solaris, Mac PPC, Win 2K, and mobile. 

• Content Protection is not available on the Standalone Player or External Player. 

• Videos that require Output Protection will only playback on Windows platforms. 

Installation/Uninstallation

• The Flash Player MSI installers report a generic error message for all installation failures (error 1722). More descriptive installation failure information can be found in the installation log file.  See this TechNote for more information.

Browser

• [FP-3312] Unable to load external unicode file names in consistent manner across browsers IE vs. Plugin. (2499705)

• Chrome:

  • SystemUpdater APIs don't do anything in Chrome5 with the embedded Flash Player plugin. 
  • Printing SWFs is not enabled in Google Chrome. We are working with Google to address this issue. (2490502) 

• Safari:

  • Printing SWFs is not enabled in Safari on Windows platforms. We are investigating this issue with Apple. (2490502) 
  • When playing back Flash content on Safari 4.0 on 10.6 in 64-bit mode, users cannot input international text or use the IME. This is fixed in the most recent version of Safari. (2499879) 

 Other Resources for Learning About Flash Player

• Flash Player Developer Center 

• Flash Player Product Page
  

• Flash Player Support
  

• Flash Player Help

• User Forums

Reporting Bugs

Found a bug? Please send the detailed bug information via the online Adobe Bug and Issue Management System.

SWF-based H.264 video may be decoded by your graphics hardware. There may be video bugs that can only be reproduced with your particular video card and driver. When reporting a bug involving video, it is essential to note your graphics card and driver, along with your operating system and browser, so that we can reproduce and investigate issues. Please be sure to include this information as described in Instructions for Reporting Video Bugs. 

Note: Due to the high volume of email we receive, we are unable to respond to every request.

Thank you for using Adobe Flash Player and for taking the time to send us your feedback!