Adobe Flash Player / FAQ

Adobe Flash Professional is an application for developing rich content, user interfaces, and web applications. Adobe Flash Player is a multiplatform client runtime. Web users must download and install Flash Player to view and interact with SWF content.

The two Adobe Flash Platform runtimes are Flash Player and Adobe AIR. Flash Player is a highly expressive cross-platform runtime that works consistently across browsers. Flash Player delivers innovation within the browser, while AIR, a superset of Flash Player, enables the delivery of standalone applications that run outside the browser. Together, they provide a consistent runtime for delivering content that can easily move between the browser and native operating system context.

Flash Player and Shockwave Player software are both free web players from Adobe. Each has a distinct purpose:

• Flash Player displays content created with Flash Professional, such as web application front ends, high-impact website user interfaces, interactive online advertising, and animations and rich Internet applications (RIAs) created using Flex.
• Shockwave Player displays content created with Adobe Director® software such as high-performance multiuser games, interactive 3D product simulations, online entertainment, and training applications. By using extensions, developers can extend the capabilities of Shockwave Player to play back custom-built applications.

The device ecosystem is experiencing a period of rapid change and innovation, with a continuous stream of new hardware, operating systems, and browsers coming to market. The dependencies can be complex to manage at times, particularly when multiple companies are working together to deliver an optimized and integrated experience for customers.

To provide consumers with an almost seamless SWF content viewing experience, Flash Player is free to license for distribution on desktop operating systems and can be distributed royalty-free on devices by members of the Open Screen Project™. Learn more about the Open Screen Project.

Flash Player is available in Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish on most major browser platforms.

Visit the Flash Player Developer Center for the latest articles and information on developing for the Flash Player runtime. For steps to get started building applications and content for Flash Player on mobile devices, visit the Mobile and Devices Developer Center.

We're always looking for great feature requests, and we try to incorporate the best ones into each release. You can submit enhancement and feature requests for the Flash Player development team to evaluate.

File any bugs in the Adobe Flash Player public bugbase, and the Flash Player team will investigate accordingly.

Read more about Flash Player security and privacy.

Periodically, Adobe updates Flash Player with new features or fixes to minor problems. The Automatic Notification and Update feature allows Adobe to automatically notify you when an updated version of Flash Player is available so that you can install it right away.

Updates to Flash Player help ensure that Flash Player works properly and may contain important security changes. Adobe recommends that you update to the latest version of Flash Player whenever a new version is available, especially when a security update is mentioned. Although you may choose whether to receive automatic notification of updates and how frequently to receive them, Adobe is not responsible for errors or security problems that occur because the version of Flash Player on your computer is not the most current one available. To disable notification settings, use the Global Notification Settings panel.

Visit Flash Player support for help with installation.

To provide a better user experience for your site, you can implement Flash Player detection when embedding SWF content. For more information about detection and installation, visit the Flash Player Developer Center. Adobe also recommends the open source SWFObject project for embedding SWF content.

Adobe provides online testing for Flash Player on the testing page. This page will tell you which version is currently installed and provides a list of the latest versions for each platform.

Information about security changes in Flash Player can be found in the Flash Player Developer Center.