Adobe has released the fourth beta of the upcoming Flash Player 11.2 and AIR 3.2. Both are minor updates to the existing runtime and platform, but they do come with new features and changes, not just bug-fixes and tweaks.
One of the big new features in Flash Player 11 and AIR 3.0 was Stage 3D, the new hardware-accelerated graphics API.
It enabled game developers and anyone wanting to add better graphics to their apps to leverage the power of the GPU resulting in significant performance improvements.
As with anything that has to go through video drivers, there are problems, meaning that hardware acceleration only works with relatively modern drivers. Adobe automatically blacklisted older drivers.
This was a conscious decision made by Adobe engineers to ensure the stability of the users' systems, even if it meant disabling hardware acceleration for millions of people.
"We took that decision when we saw how bad some drivers could be, with some horrible inconsistencies, some could basically reboot your computer when browsing a website. We just cannot allow that," Adobe's Thibault Imbert
explained why some drivers are blacklisted.
In Flash Player 11, any drivers older than January 1st, 2009 were automatically blacklisted. Of course, newer drivers that were proven to be buggy or unstable were also blacklisted. With Flash Player 11.2 drivers newer than January 1st, 2008 will work.
"Upcoming quarterly releases of Flash Player will relax the blacklisting, we are lowering the restriction from drivers older than 1/1/2009 to 1/1/2008 with Flash Player 11.2 that we are about to release in the next months," he said. "The Flash Player 11.2/AIR 3.2 beta4 we are making available today introduces this change."
The change was possible because Adobe has been working with graphics card vendors, testing older drivers and making changes to the Stage 3D API to make sure it works with as many graphics cards as possible.
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