Adobe announced the availability of Adobe Flash Player 9 (formerly Flash Player 8.5), the next-generation Flash Player client runtime.

Flash Player 9 achieves up to 10 times faster performance through ActionScript 3.0 and a new ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM), which features a Just In Time (JIT) compiler that translates ActionScript bytecode to native machine code for maximum execution speed.

Flash Player 9 provides new application runtime capabilities for Adobe Flex 2, also announced today. The Flex 2 product line provides developers with an integrated set of tools and technology for fast, end-to-end development of web applications.

Developers can now deliver powerful and dynamic multimedia content and applications via ActionScript 3.0 and a new highly optimized ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM). ActionScript 3.0 is a powerful, object-oriented ECMAScript-compliant programming language that provides a familiar syntax and compelling new language features such as ECMAScript for XML (E4X), regular expressions, and a standardized DOM event model. Adobe is an active participant in the Ecma International Programming Language technical committee (TC39-TG1) developing the ECMAScript Edition 4 (ES4) standard. ECMAScript is a foundational standard used by languages such as Adobe ActionScript, Netscape JavaScript and Microsoft JScript.

The AVM was built from the ground up to offer performance, including more efficient memory utilization, faster application start-times, improved debugging and full runtime error reporting.

Instant adoption of Flash Player 9 will continue to be facilitated via Flash Player Express Install and auto-update notification for current Fla

sh Player users.

Adobe Flash Player 9 is available immediately as a free download at www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer. Flash Player 9 is available in both English and localized versions and is offered for both Windows and Macintosh operating systems.