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Adobe Systems on Jan. 17 finally released the long-awaited Adobe Flash Player 9 for Linux. Although a binary-only release, its already proven quite popular within its first 24 hours of release.
This version of Flash Player was meant to be feature-comparable to Adobes latest Windows and Mac OS versions, which were released in late June of 2006.
All Flash Player 9 family versions render content far faster than earlier editions. On Linux, it also does a much better job at syncing video and audio.
Adobe also claims that Flash Player 9 for Linux offers more efficient memory utilization, and that it adds advanced features for graphics, video and text, as well as support for the AVM2 (ActionScript Virtual Machine), which enables up to 10 times faster scripting performance.
Ten times faster? I decided to see just how fast it was compared to Adobe Flash Player 7.0.69, the previous Linux version.
To do this, I set up both versions on an Insignia 300a, an older Best Buys house brand desktop PC. This PC has a 2.8GHz Pentium IV, 1GB of RAM, and an Ultra ATA/100, 7200 RPM, 60GB hard drive. It was running SLED 10 (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10).