Flash Player 9 released

Adobe Flash Player 9 is available to download now from the Adobe website. The big news about this version of the player is it’s support for Actionscript 3, the new version of the Flash programming language.

Here’s what Emily Huang from Adobe has to say about the new player:

Flash Player 9 builds on the innovations of Flash Player 8 by bringing even more power to the runtime through ActionScript 3.0, an important update to the ActionScript language. ActionScript 3.0 delivers a robust programming model, ground-breaking performance, and compliance with the ECMAScript standard. The language provides a familiar syntax, compelling new language features, and up to 10 times faster performance so you can rapidly build a new generation of rich media and rich Internet applications.

Registered users of Flash Professional 8 can get their hands on a preview release of the Flash 9 authoring tool from Adobe Labs, and start tinkering with AS3. The only new features exposed in this preview release are those related to Actionscript 3 and publishing in Flash 9 format.