14 DAY TRIAL // Adobe continues work on the next version of the Flash Player, so today the company introduced a brand new beta build that comes with improvements for all supported browsers.
Basically, Adobe Flash Player 14.0.0.136 Beta is supposed to make opening Flash-based content in browsers such as Firefox, Chrome, and Opera a bit easier, integrating a new PPAPI-based content debugger that could give developers the chance to try out this new solution on Windows and Mac OS X.
“An early preview of the PPAPI content debugger is available for Mac OS X and Windows. Flash Developers using Opera (dev) and Google Chrome (dev and Canary) can now try out the PPAPI-based content debugger,” Adobe confirmed as part of today's new release.
Opera users can easily turn on the new debugger by downloading the developer build of the browser and enabling the PPAI flag in settings and navigating to the opera://flags/#find-pepper-flash-plugin path.
Those running Chrome on Windows can do the same thing by going to plugins and expanding the “Details” section to access all information about the available add-ons.
“Ensure the PPAPI plugin in the \\Macromed\\Flash location is enabled and the PPAPI plugin in the Google Chrome location is disabled,” Adobe explained. Keep in mind that PPAPI works only on dev and Canary builds of Google Chrome.
At the same time, today's release brings several stability and security improvements, while also enabling developers to request a new Stage3D standard profile when creating Context3D data.
Adobe said that three new features are available in this new profile, as follows: “multiple render target allows to you to draw geometry to multiple outputs (up to 4) during one drawing; floating point texture allows you to create Texture, RectangleTexture and CubeTuxture with the RGBA16F folder; AGAL v2.”
Although it brings so many new features and improvements, keep in mind that this new Flash Player release is still part of the beta development stage, so a number of bugs and other issues might still be found while you use it. Of course, developers and more advanced users are the ones who should give it a try, especially because Adobe expects to receive feedback that could help it significantly improve performance before it launches the final product.
All in all, this is clearly a great release especially for developers, so go download Adobe Flash Player 14.0.0.136 Beta if you're a developer and want to try out all these features before they are implemented in the final build.