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What is the Flash Player? |
Flash Player is a widely distributed multimedia and application player created and distributed by Macromedia (a division of Adobe Systems).
Adobe Flash, or simply Flash, refers to both a multimedia authoring program and the Adobe Flash Player, written and distributed by Adobe, that uses vector and raster graphics, a native scripting language called ActionScript and bidirectional streaming of video and audio. Strictly speaking, Adobe Flash is the authoring environment and Flash Player is the virtual machine used to run the Flash files, but in colloquial language these have become mixed: "Flash" can mean either the authoring environment, the player, or the application files.
The Flash Player was originally designed to display 2-dimensional vector animation, but has since become suitable for creating rich Internet applications and streaming video and audio. It uses vector graphics to minimize file size and create files that save bandwidth and loading time. Flash is a common format for animations embedded into web pages.
The Flash Player is shipped with some browsers and is available for modern browsers (such as Microsoft Internet Explorer, Opera, and Mozilla Firefox) as a plugin. Each new version of the plugin is completely backwards-compatible.
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