Adobe Labs announced today the prerelease version of their award winning Flash Player 9 Update software, for Linux, Windows and Macintosh. This beta version brings new features and improvements over the previous releases, such as:

￭ Enhancements to full-screen mode to use hardware scaling for improved video performance and quality on systems running Windows 2000 and newer or Mac OS X 10.2 and newer;
￭ Faster rendering of vector graphics on multi-core CPUs;
￭ Higher quality and performance for downscaling large bitmaps (SWF 9 only);
￭ Support for caching common platform components, such as the Flex framework, to reduce average application sizes. This feature is enabled in the Flex 3 beta available on Adobe Labs.
￭ Support for full-screen mode on Linux;
￭ Recursive calling to and from JavaScript via the ExternalInterface API is now permitted (not available in Opera or Netscape);
￭ Runtime errors can now be thrown from JavaScript to ActionScript via the External Interface API;
￭ HTTP requests from the Flash Player ActiveX Control in some versions of Internet Explorer did not include the Accept-Language header. The ActiveX Control now always inserts this header.

Developers and consumers can use this version to test the content to make sure that new features function as expected, existing content plays back correctly, and there are no compatibility issues. We've tested this new version of Adobe Flash Player 9 on three browsers: Mozilla Firefox, Opera and Konqueror. In Firefox, the plugins works, but the browser crashes every time we wanted to use the 'Zoom In', 'Show All' and the 'Settings' functions from the context menu. As for Opera and Konqueror, the flash plugin doesn't seem to work anymore.

If you don't know how to install the latest version of Flash Player plugin in Linux systems, please follow the instructions below:

￭ Download the tar.gz archive and extract it.
￭ Enter the install_flash_player_9_linux directory, open a terminal and type ./flashplayer-installer to run the installer.
￭ Hit Enter and the installer will instruct you to close any opened browsers.
￭ Hit Enter again, choose an installation method and follow the instructions.
￭ Once the installation is complete, the plug-in will be installed in your Firefox or Opera browsers.
￭ Verify the installation here.

You can download Adobe Flash Player 9 for Linux right now from Softpedia.