Flash Player 8 Faster on Mac

Microsoft and Adobe-MM are intering a war for graphics applications. Apple is looking like a friend to these clowns. I speculate, that for several years Adobe and MM wanted Apple to go away so they could save money on platform development. But with MS wanting the graphics pie, and Apple Intel move are changing things. The MS desire for Graphics pie is not just the money Adobe and MM make. MS wants to control these gateways to the internet. and application development. roger

Wasn't there some statement from Microsoft that they were going to do their own online vector drawing standard? They may only be getting in to bed with Apple in order to survive via Quicktime.

My god, how long have we waited? 5 + years? Everyone develops flash on a mac and forever it never worked well running on a mac. Thank god for this one. http://www.tiger-compatible.com

Flash player was always faster on Mozilla browsers anyway. It's the Safari speed up that is quite impressive. I've been using the beta 8 player for a couple of weeks. Also, web links in Flash text boxes show the hand cursor when you roll over them in Safari, ending a frustrating usability issue from the Flash 7 player. Cheers to the Macromedia people in charge of the Mac Flash Player. It probably shouldn't have taken a full version upgrade to fix these issues, I'm glad they are now gone.

watch out though there is a known bug in firefox that creates huge problems with flash 8 player on mac and pc: http://www.flashinsider.com/2005/08/18/will-flash-8-lower-firefox-browser-share/

File under: It's about flippin time.

I can see narrow improve and speed. I am looking forward on final stage.

I it just me or does safari display flash .swf files lighter than other browsers.

Its certainly faster in Safari. The article does note that Firefox does not enjoy the same improvements (yet). A bug has been filed with Bugzilla. Hopefully this will be worked out. Some comments around the net have said that Flash still performs better on the PC even with Quartz Extreme enabled on a Mac but I think the difference isn't really all that noticeable on most sites.

Is this Macromedia's attempt to help combat the threat of AJAX (ex. Google Maps & Flickr)? I would argue that Mac users make up a rather disproportionate percentage of web developers versus web users, so their influence is probably very critical to Macromedia. Just a thought.