Flex 4 – Adobe AIR

Flash Player was initially released around 1996. (Macromedia)

• Features like animation of vector graphics.
• No Audio support.

Flash player 2 released on 1997. (Macromedia)

• Sound Support with Stereo Audio input.
• Insertion Bitmaps.
• Library support for tween between colors.

Flash Player 3 released on 1998. (Macromedia)

• Insertion of Audio and compression into MP3 for reducing the size.
• Improvement of animation, playback and publishing.

Flash Player 4 released on May 1999. (Macromedia)

• Achieved installations worldwide around 100 million
• Introduction of MP3 streaming
• Later end of year Flash Player reached almost 98% of systems with Internet.

Flash Player 5 released on August 2000. (Macromedia)

• Yes this is the time when flash started the capabilities of scripting.
• Customizing authorize environment.
• Started the thought process of usability

Flash Player 6 released on March 2002 (Macromedia)

• Great new feature of Flash Remoting (AMF) and Web Service (SOAP)
• Also started the live audio and video streaming over RTMP, use of Macromedia Communication Server
• Introduction of screenreaders via Microsoft Active Accessibility
• New Codec system added called Sorenson Spark video (FLV).
• Introduction and proper implementation of Shared Libraries

Flash Player 7 released on September 2003 (Macromedia)

• Implementation of  ActionScript 2.0
• Streaming of audios and videos as progressive way.
• Chrating and graphs support started.
• Flashlite 1.1 introduced for Flash Player Mobile Phones (based on flash player 4)

Flash Player 8 released on August 2005 (Macromedia)

• New video codec – On2 and VP6
• Support for runtime loading of GIF and PNG images
• Major performance improvement in caching especially Bitmaps
• Improvement in blendmodes and live filters.
• Introduction of Text Rendering Engine called Saffron Type System
• File upload and download capabilities
• FlashLite 2.0 released around Dec 2005 based on Flash Player 7.0

Flash Player 9 released on June 2006 (Adobe)

One of the major Aquire process in IT Industry  Adobe Aquired Macromedia.

• AVM 2
• Actionscript 3.0
• E4x parsing
• ECMAScript 4 virtual machine donated to Mozilla Foundation and named Tamarin.
• Binary Socket support
• Full screen support

In Decemeber 2007  some mojor improvement version were released with features like

• FlashLite 3.0 with FLV support
• H.264
• AAC (HE-AAC, AAC Main Profile, and AAC-LC)
• ISO Base Media File Format (MPEG-4 Part 12)

Flash Player 10 – Adobe Flash Player 10 released on October 2008

• New Features

1. 3D object transformations
2. Custom filters via Pixel Bender
3. Advanced text support
4. Speex audio codec
5. Real Time Media Flow Protocol (RTMFP)
6. Dynamic sound generation
7. Vector data type

• Enhanced Features

1. Larger bitmap support
2. Graphics drawing API
3. Context menu
4. Hardware acceleration
5. Anti-aliasing engine (Saffron 3.1)
6. Read/write clipboard access
7. WMODE

So there is a major changes in flash player in the past,  but most will be thinking about the new features of flash player 10.

How and what are the new flash player 10 features,  in my next posts I will focus on the flash player architecture and will take the new features of FP 10 individually so keep looking the blogs.