Adobe releases Flash 10.1 with patch bundle

Adobe has released a new version of Flash for all major desktop operating systems

Adobe has released the final build of Flash 10.1 and AIR 2 for Windows, Mac and Linux, along with a bundle of patches for existing code. Flash 10.1 for Android will be released later this month.

Flash 10.1 has been designed to operate on a wide variety of platforms, and has been optimised to work with different powered processors and memory capacities.

Improvements include a lower memory footprint, especially for bitmap-intensive applications, a tweaked ActionScript virtual machine and lower power consumption for content running in the background on a non-visible browser tab.

Desktop users will benefit from hardware-based H.264 video decoding, according to Adobe, and the software has a video viewing system dubbed Smart Seek which adds digital video recorder functions such as rewind and fast forward.

The incorporation of the Real Time Media Flow Protocol should also boost video performance, the firm said.

Multi-touch controls have been added, and Adobe has published the APIs for pinch, scroll, rotate, scale and two-finger tap. The software is also capable of a private browsing mode where personal data is wiped.

"Mac performance was also an explicit focus for us," said Paul Betlem, senior director of Flash Player engineering at Adobe, in a blog post.

"One improvement we made is the use of a double-buffered OpenGL context for improved full-screen playback efficiency.

"We also investigated a number of compile-time optimisations using Xcode to improve our overall execution speed of Flash Player on Macs."

Adobe also released patches with the new version for some serious security flaws in Flash. The 10.1.53.64 update fixes 32 issues that could allow remote code execution, system crashes or the loss of virtualised images.