Adobe Flash Player is software used to view multimedia content on computers or other supported devices first released in 1996. Users looking for an application to play audio and video would download Flash Player and those who want to play a wide variety of browser games. Flash technology enables users to view media and animations in greater detail, so video games are more immersive. There are currently over 20,000 apps in the Apple and Android mobile stores that require some type of flash technology to run smoothly, as well as some of the most popular Facebook games in the gaming section. Certain webcams and microphones also require the flash technology and the functions are enabled once the users have accepted the permissions.
Adobe Flash Player can be run on some versions of Windows, Mac, Linux, and their respective browsers. It is also available on Android devices up to Android 4.3. Adobe announced in 2012 that it would no longer be releasing updates for Android devices. Download Adobe Flash Player for Windows now from Softonic: 100% safe and virus free. More than 166337 downloads this month. Download Adobe Flash Player latest version 2021. Download the latest version of Shockwave Player for Mac. Play multimedia content developed for Shockwave. While Adobe Flash Player is the most widely used Flash.
Software to view multimedia has long been surpassed by competitors
Outdated, unsafe software has met its end-of-life
In its prime, Flash Player was a must-have. At one point, the software was required to run most interactive applications on the internet. The software is a runtime, or a system that describes the library that coding language runs on. It works by running content from SWF files, which is an Adobe specific file format for multimedia and animations. There are a number of reasons that Flash Player was so popular, one being that flash files were very small. This meant that loading times for games and other software that needed Flash to run were shorter. When it was first released, the browser plugin was free so it was incorporated into a lot of web browsers. Once embedded into a website's GUI, it morphed the site from flat into exciting and interactive. YouTube, the most popular video sharing website around, was one of the many websites that used to be powered by Flash Player. To this day, a lot of animators still use Flash in their animation software because it is simple to learn how to use.
Although Flash Player was the backbone of the internet, due to a lot of privacy and security concerns most users have moved away from using it. Flash supports the use of local shared objects which, like cookies, store user data and can be potentially problematic if a lot of web browsing information is compiled over time.
Due to the amount of moving parts, playing games or using software that has Flash will drain your device battery significantly, which is a hassle since it's not good to constantly have your devices plugged into a charger will in use. If you have an iPhone, you won't be able to use anything that has Flash in it as none of the devices support it due to the repeated security issues and because it isn't really open sourced. Use of the software is more trouble than it is worth, and because of this, Adobe recently announced that it will end updates and distribution of the flash player at the end of 2020. The main reasons for the death of the software are that competitors are now lightyears ahead of Flash in terms of functionality and what is offered, and that plugins, in general, are dying out. HTML5 is becoming more and more widely used as it needs less processing power and doesn't require any plugins. Adobe went on to say that other big tech companies with products that once worked in conjunction with Flash, have come together and agreed to phase out the software altogether unless it is essential to the core of the technology.
Where can you run this program?
Adobe Flash Player can be run on some versions of Windows, Mac, Linux, and their respective browsers. It is also available on Android devices up to Android 4.3. Adobe announced in 2012 that it would no longer be releasing updates for Android devices. Since Flash Player is due to end-of-life and the end of 2020, many mobile and desktop platforms are no longer including the newer versions of Flash in their software updates.
Is there a better alternative?
HTML5 is the best alternative to Adobe Flash Player. The latest versions of Chrome, Opera, Safari, and Firefox all support HTML5, and most developers are moving in that direction. YouTube is another big name that has incorporated HTML5 into its video player, and most mobile iOS and Android mobile devices have software that works well with it. It already comes with most things that it needs to be supported by a browser, but Flash Player needs to have a plugin installed. HTML5 is open sourced and anybody can continue to improve it, though it is already very secure and lightweight. Adobe itself has encouraged the use of this software as the best alternative.
Our take
Latest Adobe Flash Player For Mac
Adobe Flash Player is dead in the water. It is outdated, not secure, and always seems to be at risk of being hacked. Software and games that use the flash player will soon have other programs that will take its place, if it hasn't happened already.
Should I download it?
No, we do not recommend downloading Adobe Flash Player. Since Adobe announced that it will no longer be updating the flash player, there is no reason to continue to install older versions as there are safer, more secure, and better-performing options. Times have changed and software has far surpassed what Flash is capable of.
32.0.0.207
Stage 3D Accelerated Graphics Rendering (Player & AIR desktop + AIR for TV)
Stage 3D is a new architecture for hardware accelerated graphics rendering developed that provides a set of low-level APIs that enable advanced 2D and 3D rendering capabilities across screens and devices (desktop, mobile, and TV). Using Stage 3D, app and framework developers can now access high performance GPU hardware acceleration, enabling the creation of new classes of rich, interactive experiences. Note: Stage 3D for mobile versions of Flash Player & AIR will be enabled in a future releaseEnter your state here.
Flash Access Content Protection Support for Mobile
Flash Access content protection support is now available on mobile devices including Android powered smartphones and tablets. In addition, content protection is now supported on tablet devices powered by the BlackBerry® Tablet OS. Note: Flash Access for iOS is not supported at this time.
Flash Access Content Protection Enhancements
New Flash Access content protection features include key rotation support, V3 license chaining, domain support and enhanced output protection and device filtering.
Protected HTTP Dynamic Streaming (HDS)
Protected HTTP Dynamic Streaming (HDS) provides protection for streaming video across screens while eliminating the deployment complexity of a license server.
NetStream.dispose()
Similar to NetStream.close() except that it also clears up the last frame held up by NetStream to be displayed on the Video object. Use this instead of NetStream.close() if the NetStream is to be re-used for other streams later. It enforces garbage collection of the video frame and related decompressor objects. The video object will display a blank frame after the use of this method.
H.264/AVC Software Encoding for Cameras (desktop)
Stream high-quality video from your computer's camera with higher compression efficiency and industry stanard support, enabling both immersive real-time communications such as video chat/conferencing and live video broadcasts.
JPEG-XR support
Adobe Flash Download For Mac
Flash Player and AIR now include support for the JPEG-XR advanced image compression standard (International Standard ISO/IEC 29199-2). The computationally lightweight JPEG-XR format provides more efficient compression than JPEG, enables both lossy and lossless compression support, and adds support for alpha channel transparency.
Enhanced high resolution bitmap support
BitmapData objects are no longer limited to a maximum resolution of 16 megapixels (16,777,215 pixels), and maximum bitmap width/height is no longer limited to 8,191 pixels, enabling the development of apps that utilize very large bitmaps.
High efficiency SWF compression support
Developers can now take advantage of LZMA compression for their SWF files. LZMA compression can reduce SWF size by up to 40%, enabling users to benefit from richer experiences with shorter download times and reduced bandwidth consumption.
G.711 Audio Compression for Telephony
Support interoperability with legacy phone systems via the Flash Media Gateway (FMG) and other third-party clients (through the open RTMP protocol) without the need for transcoding.
Native JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) Support
Allows ActionScript developers to take advantage of high performance native parsing and generation of JSON-formatted data.
Garbage Collection Advice
Provides smoother, more responsive user experiences by allowing developers to provide hints to optimize garbage collection scheduling.
Cubic Bezier Curves
The cubicCurveTo drawing API allows developers to easily create complex cubic Beziers without requiring custom ActionScript code.
Secure Random Number Generator
Developers can now take advantage of cryptographically secure random number generation to build more secure algorithms and protocols.
Socket Progress Events
Improve management of data transfer using the Socket class by providing a new property to determine the number of bytes remaining in the write buffer and a new event for when data is being sent to the network layer. Using these new APIs, developers can build applications such as file transfer utilities that monitor socket progress and provide responsive feedback.
DisplayObjectContainer.removeChildren and MovieClip.isPlaying
Adobe Flash Plugin For The Mac
DisplayObjectContainer now implements a removeChildren API allowing developers to quickly remove all of a container's children using a single API call. A new MovieClip.isPlaying property returns the MovieClip's current playing state.
New Features in Flash Player
Native 64-bit Support (Flash Player desktop) — Take advantage of native support for 64-bit operating systems and 64-bit web browsers on Linux, Mac OS, and Windows.
Asynchronous Bitmap Decoding (new for Flash Player) — Improve app responsiveness and deliver smoother animation by decoding images on initial load instead of on demand. Images are cached as needed.
TLS Secure Sockets Support (new for Flash Player) — Enables secure communications for client/server applications.
What's New:
In today's release, we've updated Flash Player with critical security and functional bug fixes. We recommend all customers upgrade to this version.
For those organizations that use the Extended Support Release (ESR), please note that we have incremented the ESR from version 13 to version 18 with today's update.
Current Flash Player users who have enrolled in the 'Allow Adobe to install updates (recommended)' update mechanism will be automatically updated to the latest version of Flash Player over the next 24 hours.
Users who have selected 'Notify me to install updates' will receive an update notification dialog within 7 days from today. Please note that Windows users will need to restart their system or log out and in to activate the update notification dialog.
Flash Player can always be downloaded and installed by simply visiting https://get.adobe.com/flashplayer
Customers using Google Chrome or Windows 8.x Internet Explorer will receive the update through the Google and Microsoft update mechanisms.
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