Update to Flash player 9

Adobe has published an update to their ubiquitous Flash player, adding on to it new features as well as incorporating some bug fixes. The update applies to all common platforms, including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. It is nice that they chose to update all three platforms at once rather than significantly delaying an update to other platforms, such as how it took them so long to bring version 9 to Linux.

The update adds hardware scaling support for fullscreen mode, which might make full screen streaming videos play significantly better if they were jumpy due to software rendering slowness. They also included an enhancement specific to systems with multicore processors, with multi-core support for vector rendering. You can update it at Adobe's site.

Some of the features, with as H.264 video support, are likely being implemented now as a result of Microsoft's recently Silverlight release, which is intended to compete with Flash.