Flash Player 9 Update 3 Sim-Ships on Windows, Mac, and Linux

Yesterday was a monumental day for Flash Player. For the first time ever, a major release of Flash Player was simultaneously shipped for all three of the major operating systems - Windows, Mac, and Linux! This illustrates Adobe’s commitment to being truly cross-platform. There isn’t a ubiquitous platform in existence that is as committed to cross-platform compatibility as Adobe is with Flash Player. This is one of the things I love about Flash Player. Sun promised us “Write Once, Run Anywhere” with Java and yet they have never been able to really deliver it. Theoretically maybe, but in reality how many Java apps / applets do you see with the breadth of use that Flash Player has? Despite Java’s disappointing failure of true ubiquitous cross-platform compatibility I am hopeful that the OpenJDK will fix this. The OpenJDK does seem to be fixing the recent problem of Java 6 not being available on OS X.

Congrats to the Flash Player team! This is a significant milestone that everyone benefits from!

For those of you building Flex applications you can download the debug versions of this new release here. Also there is more information about all the great new features and bug fixes in this release on Tinic’s blog, Mike’s blog, and Emmy’s blog.