The release of Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 has been set for early october. This includes the exciting introduction of Stage 3D (formally code named Molehill), a new architecture for hardware-accelerated graphics rendering that delivers 1000x faster rendering performance over Flash Player 10. It enables console-quality games, immersive apps and high-quality HD video conferencing. Stage 3D enables content that efficiently animates millions of objects on screen, smoothly rendered at 60 frames per second — the result is a fluid, cinematic app, game and website experience.
While this is all very exciting to us, the most common client questions about flash always tend to relate to proliferation and the ubiquity of various versions. So it is perhaps worthwhile to look at some numbers.
Adoption of new Flash Player releases has been accelerating
Nearly half of the web upgrades Flash Player within four weeks of a new release — so websites can expect that many of the 1 billion+ people with Flash Player will be able to reap the benefits of Stage 3D soon, bringing modern GPU hardware acceleration to more people on the web than any other technology.
9 of the top 10 games on Facebook are Flash based
Approximately 70% of web games are powered by Flash, along with about 70% of the games on Google+, and the top social games from companies like Zynga and EA.
So while various corporate firewalls / software policies may serve to convince clients that Flash isn't a significant platform upon which to deliver their creative, it is worth acknowledging that, by Christmas, roughly 500,000,000 machines will have Flash player 11.
So, to get you excited, here are a couple of examples of what this new technology can do.
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