What's New in Flash Player 11

Chapter 6. Runtime Enhancements

Among the language and runtime enhancements in Flash Player 11 are a variety of new classes, methods, properties, and architectures whose aim it is to make things easier, smaller, and faster in regard to the runtime and its usage. In this chapter, we will have a look at the variety of language and runtime improvements along with general implementation examples that can be easily built upon for a variety of projects.

Native 64-bit Support

Flash Player comes in a variety of distributions for different desktop and mobile platforms (as always). With Flash Player 11, desktop users of Microsoft Windows, Apple OS X, and a variety of Linux distributions are able to choose between 32-bit or native 64-bit versions of the runtime. There are many advantages to this, mainly having to do with increased compatibility with 64-bit web browsers and operating systems.

Note

With the mobile versions of the Flash Player runtime, the user has no real choice in what is supported, as these versions are tailored to those specific platforms.

There is no action a developer or user must take to enable 64-bit support, as it is integral to the user’s choice of browser. Everything should behave the same whether using the 32-bit or 64-bit version of the desktop plugin.