Yesterday, Adobe Labs released their “Preview 1” of a new flashplayer browser plugin they have been developing. As you may know, the previous test version of a Linux version of their plugin was withdrawn because it was riddled with security holes, performance issues and suffered from a bad codebase.

The newly developed code seems to be cross-platform since there are preview releases of this Flash Player ‘Square’ to be downloaded for Windows and Mac OS as well.

See http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/ for the announcement and downloadables.

So far, I am pleased with the performance and feature-set of this new plugin. Other people report that this plugin finally supports Hulu, which is a US-only video broadcast service so I can not test it from here.

I have created Slackware packages for the new flashplayer (32-bit as well as 64-bit), you can grab those at http://slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/flashplayer-plugin/ . These pacakges install the plugin into the generic mozilla plugins directory so that all mozilla-based browsers will be able to use it.

Eric