Alongside Flash 11 Adobe has also announced version 3 of the Flash-based runtime, Adobe Air.

Flash Player 11 and Air 3 are scheduled for release in early October. Adobe hasn’t set an exact date, but the company’s annual Max conference, which runs October 1-5, seems a safe bet.

Adobe’s Flash browser plugin has taken a beating in the last few years, losing many of its traditional web roles like video or animations to the new features in HTML5. Additionally, the mobile world has not been kind to Flash. You won’t find the plugin on any Apple products, nor will it be part of the upcoming Windows 8 Metro platform.

While there are no doubt many Webmonkey readers who would like to see Flash disappear forever, Adobe continues to push Flash in directions which, so far, HTML5 can’t compete.

For this release that means the world of online 3-D graphics rendering. Flash 11 isn’t trying to compete with HTML5 or even reclaim its former strongholds like video (though for streaming DRM video it remains the only real choice). Instead Adobe is going after the burgeoning online gaming market with an impressive new 3-D rendering API.

The new Stage 3D rendering in Flash 11, nicknamed Molehill, is a very low level API for fully hardware accelerated 2-D and 3-D graphics. Adobe claims that Molehill can “efficiently animate millions of objects on screen, smoothly rendered at 60 frames per second.” The end result, according to Adobe, is “console-quality games” in the browser.

Indeed the videos Adobe has released showing off the new Molehill-based graphics are impressive.

Of course one day WebGL may well mean that Flash 11′s 3-D performance is possible without the Flash plugin. Unfortunately Internet Explorer still lacks WebGL support and WebGL’s performance varies considerably from browser to browser. For now Flash 11 looks to have the edge in 3-D graphics, whether or not that will last remains to be seen.

3-D Graphics aren’t the only thing new in this release, Flash 11 is now a 64-bit application on Windows, OS X and Linux. Adobe has also announced the release of Air 3.0 with improved tools for installing Air and converting Air apps to native iOS and Android applications.

If you hate Flash the latest release probably isn’t going to change your mind. Nor is it likely to convince Apple or Microsoft that Flash should be apart of their OSes. But if you’re a game developer who’d like to build console-quality games on the web, Flash 11 is your friend.

See Also:

• Metro-style Internet Explorer 10 Ditches Flash, Plugins
• Make Waves with WebGL Demo ‘Water’
• Google Taps Danger Mouse to Show Off the Power of WebGL

Google has updated the dev channel of its Chrome web browser, adding a new option to delete so-called Flash Cookies. Technically known as “local shared objects” (LSO), Flash Cookies don’t go away when you clear your browser-based cookies. Unless, that is, you happen to be using the dev channel of Google Chrome.

Chrome’s new feature adds Flash LSOs to the list of items you can delete when you clear your browser data. To try out the new tool, grab the latest copy of the Chrome dev channel and head to the wrench menu. Look for the “tools” menu item and then select Clear Browsing Data.

Chrome’s new Flash Cookie cleaning tool works because of the new ClearSiteData API, which was developed by Adobe, Google and Mozilla. The goal is to make deleting plugin-based cookies as simple as normal, browser-based cookies. In Flash’s case the new API will make its official debut when Flash Player 10.3 arrives (it’s currently in the release candidate stage). Prior to the API deleting Flash cookies required navigating through the Flash Player settings dialog and visiting Adobe’s website.

Unfortunately most users are not aware of LSOs, let alone the labyrinthian process required to delete them. The new API turns over the task of managing plugin-based cookies to the web browser, meaning you can control everything from one place. At the moment only the Flash plugin supports the new API, but hopefully other plugins will follow suit.

Since Mozilla has been a part of the API development process, look for Firefox nightlies and Aurora to offer similar options in the coming months.

One thing to keep in mind, unless you have Flash 10.3 installed, the new API won’t work, which is part of the reason you’ll find the new features in Chrome — which ships with Flash built in — and not in Chromium, which does not bundle Flash. Once Flash 10.3 is a final release, look for other browsers to begin offering LSO delete tools as well.

See Also:

• Adobe Working on an Easier Way to Delete ‘Flash Cookies’
• Warning: This Site May Be Sharing Your Data
• Google Adds Malware Protection to Chrome 12

Even though its Flash technology is used as a punching bag by web standards fans, Adobe has been working hard to embrace HTML5. The company released its own HTML5 video player, and Adobe Illustrator and Dreamweaver CS5 contain a number of new HTML5 export tools. Now Adobe is turning its HTML5 attentions to Flash with the release of Wallaby, a new Flash-to-HTML5 converter.

Wallaby is a free Adobe AIR application that allows designers and developers to convert Adobe Flash files (FLAs) into standards-based HTML5, CSS 3 and Javascript files.

Wallaby isn’t quite ready for prime time yet, but you can grab the pre-release version from Adobe Labs if you’d like to experiment.

Adobe first showed off Wallaby at the company’s MAX conference last year and the target use was pretty clear: Apple’s iOS devices. Since iOS doesn’t support Adobe Flash, developers using Flash for their web content need an alternate solution for iOS mobile devices — enter Wallaby.

Because iOS is the primary use case for Wallaby, the generated code relies on some WebKit-only CSS features, which means that Wallaby’s results won’t work in every web browser. In other words, Wallaby is not yet a magic bullet for those who’d like to make the jump from Flash to HTML5. For example, any timeline animations in your Flash file will be converted into CSS 3 Animations.

It’s great to see Adobe using the CSS Animations standard, but sadly the animations spec only works reliably in WebKit-based browsers (Safari, Chrome and Mobile Safari). Once other browsers implement CSS 3 animations, Wallaby could become a more useful, general purpose tool.

Wallaby also won’t convert some Flash elements to HTML5 because there simply is no HTML5 equivalent. For example, Flash’s blend modes and some Flash filters won’t convert, but Wallaby will warn you when something in your FLA file won’t be exported to HTML5. For a complete list of supported Flash features, see the Wallaby documentation page on Adobe Labs.

Wallaby’s biggest Achilles’ heel is that it can’t convert ActionScript to JavaScript.

Adobe’s Tom Barclay, senior product manager for the Adobe Creative Suite business, tells Webmonkey that, for now, the primary use case for Wallaby is converting simple Flash banner ads into something iOS users can see. For that use case, Wallaby works well. For anything beyond it, you’ll have to break out your text editor and tweak things by hand.

But just because Wallaby won’t do it for you, doesn’t mean it can’t be a starting point for converting more complex Flash movies. Wallaby will even preserve any instance names in your Flash movie, making it easier to do the AS-to-JS conversion yourself.

Right now Wallaby is at the preview-release stage and Adobe is looking to gauge developer interest. If you’ve got suggestions for how Adobe can improve Wallaby, or want to let the company know which Flash features you’d like to see added, be sure to let them know.

Barclay did not rule out the possibility that Wallaby might one day be able to turn ActionScript into JavaScript (both languages are based on ECMAScript and have considerable overlap).

While Barclay said Adobe has no firm plans at this point, he hinted that eventually Wallaby’s conversion tools could be rolled into Flash Professional itself as an export option. For now though, if you’d like to take Wallaby for a spin, head over to Adobe Labs and download a copy.

See Also:

• Adobe Shows Off Flash-to-HTML5 Converter
• Export Adobe Illustrator Drawings and Animations to HTML5
• Adobe Adds HTML5 Creation Tools to Dreamweaver

The latest developer channel release of the Chrome browser now supports sandboxing for Adobe’s Flash Player on Windows 7, Vista and XP.

This feature should provide extra protection against malicious browser exploits through the Flash Player. The dev channel releases of Chrome on Windows already support sandboxing for HTML rendering and JavaScript execution, two of the most common paths people can use to run malicious code on an unsuspecting user’s machine. Sandboxing keeps these sensitive parts of the browser more secure while still allowing web pages and apps to access the other, less-sensitive parts of the browser.

Windows users on the dev channel should see the update arrive automatically. We should note that the sandbox does have some bugs and may break other parts of the browser — this is a developer release, after all. Once the kinks are ironed out, all of these sandboxing features will begin making their way into proper stable Chrome releases.

Google’s Chromium team has been working with Adobe to build better Flash controls into Chrome, and to utilize Chrome’s sandboxing technology for the plug-in. Google says Wednesday’s update makes Chrome the only browser on XP that sandboxes Flash. For more about sandboxing and how Chrome is implementing it, read the overview post on the Chromium blog from October. Also, Wednesday’s release comes less than a month after Chrome introduced click-to-play controls for Flash and other plug-ins.

Adobe’s Flash Player is the most widely-used browser plug-in on the web, and it’s the dominant choice for video playback and games online. Even so, the technology gets beat up for performance issues and its security shortcomings, and it’s still falling out of favor among standards enthusiasts who are pushing HTML5 as the better solution for displaying multimedia in the browser.

Adobe also released a new beta version of the Flash Player on Wednesday that improves some of its performance issues.

See also:

• New Flash Player 10.2 Goes Easy on the CPU
• Chrome Now Offers Click-to-Play Option for Flash, Other Plugins
• Chrome 7 Arrives With Bug Fixes, Better HTML5 Support

[Updated, see below] Adobe has released the first beta of Flash Player 10.2, an update that focuses primarily on speed and performance improvements. New in Flash 10.2 is something Adobe calls “Stage Video hardware acceleration,” which the company claims will “decrease processor usage and enable higher frame rates, reduced memory usage, and greater pixel fidelity and quality.” And the hardware acceleration technology does do all of these things, though your mileage will vary depending on what kind of hardware and software you’re using.

To try out the new Flash Player 10.2 beta, head over the Adobe download page. Be aware that, while 10.2 appears to be relatively stable, it is a beta release and there may be bugs.

The Stage Video hardware acceleration means that Flash Player 10.2 can leverage your graphics card for not just H.264 hardware decoding (which works in Flash Player 10.1) but also color conversion, scaling, and blitting.

Adobe’s press release makes a rather bold claim: “using Stage Video, we’ve seen laptops play smooth 1080p HD video with just over 0% CPU usage.”

Sadly, we have not seen such results. While we won’t argue with the smoothness of the playback in this new release, Flash is still going to use quite a bit of your PC’s CPU. Based on my testing (done on a Macbook Pro laptop using both Firefox 4b7 and Safari 5, and a Mac Pro tower using the same browsers — Wired is an all-Mac office), while CPU usage is down in Flash 10.2, it’s still a long way from zero.

Update: Since this article was published, we’ve been hearing from you, our awesome readers, in the comments and over e-mail. Some things to note: The new beta performs much better on Windows computers than it does under Mac OS X. Also, full hardware acceleration on Mac OS X requires Snow Leopard or later, otherwise it falls back to using software rendering in the CPU. Thanks for the comments, and keep them coming!

On our Macs, we tested several 1080p videos on YouTube in Flash Player 10.1 and found that on average the 10.1 plugin used between 44-48 percent CPU. Watching the same movie in Flash 10.2 did drop the CPU usage down to the 18-22 percent range, but definitely not zero.

Worse, running the same tests on Adobe’s Stage Video optimized demos, Flash 10.2 actually performed worse than than it did on normal 1080p movies with the cpu usage varying widely between 5 and 60 percent (the 18-20 percent range appears to be the norm).

The short story is that, while Flash 10.2 does offer decreased processor usage, it doesn’t quite live up to Adobe’s claims. While Flash Player 10.2′s performance falls short of the hype, there’s no question that it’s a huge leap forward in terms of performance. The smaller CPU footprint alone is well worth the upgrade, provided you don’t mind running beta software. So far Adobe has not set a final release data for Flash 10.2.

One other thing to keep in mind: to take advantage of the new Stage Video tools, sites like YouTube and Vimeo will need to alter their video players. So, it may be some time before the full benefit of Stage Video’s improvements makes it to your day-to-day web browsing.

As for other new features in this release, there’s Internet Explorer 9 GPU support and support for fullscreen mode with dual monitors — meaning that you can have a movie on one screen and keep working on another.

Custom cursors get some love in this release, too, with Flash Player 10.2 handing off the job to the operating system rather than using resources to manually draw custom cursors. The beta also improves text rendering, adding sub-pixel rendering enhancements that should make your typography look a bit nicer and more readable.

It’s worth noting that the Flash Player 10.2 beta does not replace the Flash Player “Square” preview release — in other words, Flash Player 10.2 still isn’t 64-bit native. If 64-bit support is important to you, stick with the Flash Player “Square” preview.

See Also:

• Adobe Flash Player 10.1 Arrives
• Adobe Revamps Flash Player for Netbooks, P2P, Private Browsing
• Adobe Fights Off HTML5 Threat With New Flash Player 10.1

Adobe has released the first beta for Flash 10.1, the next major milestone for the Flash Player plugin.

Flash 10.1 is an important update not just for its enhanced speed and new features, but also for Adobe to show that there is in fact still a place for Flash on the web.

Flash’s ubiquity as the solution for web video and animations has been challenged recently; first by HTML5, which gives developers a standardized way to embed audio, video and animation without resorting to Flash, and also by Apple’s decision to ban Flash from its iPhone/iPad platform.

While we expect HTML5 to slowly but surely replace Flash for common tasks like web audio and video, the plugin still offers many features HTML5 doesn’t and Flash 10.1 builds on those strengths with several new features.

The two most interesting features for web developers are the new priority tag in the Flash HTML embed code and the peer-assisted networking features.

The priority tag is especially helpful for speeding up page load times on netbooks and mobile devices since it allows developers to lower the priority of a Flash movie. Set the priority tag to something low and your Flash movie won’t try to load until the rest of the page is already finished. That means faster page load times and no waiting around for large Flash movies before you see the surrounding content.

The peer-assisted networking builds on Flash’s existing P2P capabilities to offer peer-based streaming media — think BitTorrent in your Flash player. However, don’t look for Flash-based torrent clients, what’s more likely are browser-based VOIP apps, better chat features in Flash games, improved conferencing applications and possibly even P2P radio streaming.

Other new features available in Flash 10.1 include support for the host browser’s “private browsing” mode (Flash won’t accept cookies or other local objects when you’re in “private” mode), a new accelerometer class (don’t even think about using it for the iPhone), hardware video decoding, much better performance and more.

For full details on everything that’s new, be sure to check out the release notes.

For now Flash 10.1 is a beta release, so it’s a bit soon to start using the new features in the wild. But if you’d like to test them out, head over to the Adobe Labs download page and grab a copy (be sure to use the uninstaller to delete your existing Flash Player before you install the new version). The updated Flash for Mobile client will reportedly be arriving later in 2010.

See Also:

• Adobe Fights Off HTML5 Threat With New Flash Player 10.1
• Flash CS5 First Look: Adobe Drops a Hefty Update Into Stormy Waters
• Adobe CTO Defends Flash Against Apple, HTML5
• Flash Faces Down Threats on Adobe’s Big Day