Flash Player 10 Available for Public Testing

For those of you who love your cutting-edge Flash content, Adobe made a prerelease test version of the Flash 10 Player


Flash Player 10 Available for Public Testing

For those of you who really, really love your cutting-edge Flash content, Adobe made a prerelease test version of the Flash 10 Player available today. You can download an installer for Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux from the Adobe Labs Web site.

Because this is a testing version, you're not likely to see any content that requires the new player in the wild just yet. But if you design or maintain Web pages yourself, it might be a good idea to give them a whirl with the beta player, just to make sure that all your old content still renders the way it should with the new version.

Among the new features in this edition of Flash Player are support for new 3D rendering effects, Adobe Pixel Blender filters, new drawing APIs, and an advanced text rendering engine. What's more, Flash Player 10 has expanded use of hardware graphics acceleration, so Flash content should be a little snappier.

Don't expect it to be completely without bugs, though. In fact, it's safe to assume that not everything will work exactly as expected -- this is a public beta release, after all. When you do encounter abnormal behavior, be sure to submit feedback to Adobe and/or discuss your issues in the public forums.

As for when we can start authoring content for use with Flash Player 10, expect an announcement from Adobe regarding the next version of Creative Suite on May 27.