Adobe pushes its Flash 10 beta 2 refresh

The latest beta update to Flash Player 10 has been made available, adding performance enhancements and many community-suggested features.

Adobe's Flash Player 10 build 10.0.1.525 is the second beta edition of the player in as many months. Mac users should note that device text rendering has received a performance boost, improving the speed of OS X Flash Player, Adobe Engineer Tinic Uro says in his blog that it should be up to three times faster.

The Linux version has also added support for WMode=transparent -- the ability to render SWFs in "windowless" mode (both transparent and opaque). This means that Linux users with Opera 9.50 or Firefox 3 can now enjoy the same full-browser "exploding" advertisements as Windows and OS X users. Users have already begun logging reproduceable VMode bugs in the Penguin.SWF blog.

Release notes list new community-requested features which have been added to the beta 2 build, including the previously mentioned WMode, Video4Linux v2 (V4L2) camera API support, and unloadAndStop support for ActionScript 2.0 (a feature that immediately removes loaded content, stopping audio, removing eventListeners and making it inaccessible). Also added is the ability for fullScreen games and video to be controlled with non-text keyboard keys (arrows, shift, tab, enter, space).