Adobe Promises to Make Flash Player 10.1 Faster and Fix 16-Month Old Security Flaw
Flash Player for the Mac OS X will receive a speed boost announced Adobe, the California-based company that specializes in creating multimedia and creativity software products. Until now, the Windows version has always been faster than the Mac version, despite the fact that for each operating system, we're basically talking about the same code. Adobe announced that it would work together with Apple to make Flash faster – equally fast as the Windows version.
“Given identical hardware, Flash Player on Windows has historically been faster than the Mac. We have and continue to invest significant effort to make Mac OS optimizations to close this gap, and Apple has been helpful in working with us on this. Vector graphics rendering in Flash Player 10 now runs almost exactly the same in terms of CPU usage across Mac and Windows, which is due to this work. In Flash Player 10.1 we are moving to CoreAnimation, which will further reduce CPU usage and we believe will get us to the point where Mac will be faster than Windows for graphics rendering,” explained Chief Technology Officer with Adobe, Kevin Lynch.
Moving on, Adobe also promised to fix a bug that crashes the Flash Player – on all supported platforms, not just Mac or Windows. What’s the big deal? This bug was discovered back in the month of September, 2008. That is more than 16 months ago. The one to discover the bug is Matthew Dempsky, who reported it to Adobe. A year and some months later and the bug is still plaguing Flash Player.
Flash Player Manager with Adobe, Emmy Huang apologized for the situation and reassured users the bug would be fixed in Flash Player 10.1.
“We picked up the bug as a crasher when it was filed on September 22, 2008, and were able to reproduce it,” said Emmy Huang. “The mistake we made was marking this bug for "next" release, which is the soon to be released Flash Player 10.1, instead of marking it for the next Flash Player 10 security dot release. We should have kept in contact with the submitter and to let him know the progress, sorry we did not do that. Having that line of communication open would have allowed him to let us know directly that it was still an issue. It slipped through the cracks, and it is not something we take lightly.”
“Given identical hardware, Flash Player on Windows has historically been faster than the Mac. We have and continue to invest significant effort to make Mac OS optimizations to close this gap, and Apple has been helpful in working with us on this. Vector graphics rendering in Flash Player 10 now runs almost exactly the same in terms of CPU usage across Mac and Windows, which is due to this work. In Flash Player 10.1 we are moving to CoreAnimation, which will further reduce CPU usage and we believe will get us to the point where Mac will be faster than Windows for graphics rendering,” explained Chief Technology Officer with Adobe, Kevin Lynch.
Moving on, Adobe also promised to fix a bug that crashes the Flash Player – on all supported platforms, not just Mac or Windows. What’s the big deal? This bug was discovered back in the month of September, 2008. That is more than 16 months ago. The one to discover the bug is Matthew Dempsky, who reported it to Adobe. A year and some months later and the bug is still plaguing Flash Player.
Flash Player Manager with Adobe, Emmy Huang apologized for the situation and reassured users the bug would be fixed in Flash Player 10.1.
“We picked up the bug as a crasher when it was filed on September 22, 2008, and were able to reproduce it,” said Emmy Huang. “The mistake we made was marking this bug for "next" release, which is the soon to be released Flash Player 10.1, instead of marking it for the next Flash Player 10 security dot release. We should have kept in contact with the submitter and to let him know the progress, sorry we did not do that. Having that line of communication open would have allowed him to let us know directly that it was still an issue. It slipped through the cracks, and it is not something we take lightly.”
