Lightspark, a free Flash player, available in beta
Lightspark, a FOSS Flash player the developer says is "designed from the ground up to be efficient on current and (hopefully) future hardware" is now available as a beta version. Lightspark features hardware accelerated OpenGL-based rendering and the beta has almost complete support for the newer version of the Flash scripting language, ActionScript 3.0, which was introduced in Flash 9. The beta version even includes some performance profiling and debugging tools. In addition to the stand-alone player there is also a Mozilla compatible plug-in.
The developer, Alessandro Pignotti, says the Lightspark code has been written entirely based on the SWF specifications released by Adobe, so there is no reverse engineering involved.
A Lightspark beta is available as an Ubuntu package in a Launchpad PPA repository. Pignotti requests users report any errors that occur with the beta version through the Launchpad bug tracker.
(trk)