Adobe’s Flash Player was born twenty years ago and today is installed on 750 million desktops and mobile devices connected to the internet. It’s used by home users and organizations to view multimedia, to execute rich Internet applications and stream video and audio files. It is known that the software has received many updates lately, because there were found many vulnerabilities that could be exploited by attackers to gain control of devices and the latest version, 23.0.0.185, has just been released for Firefox, Safari, Opera and Internet Explorer.
All browsers already include Adobe Flash Player built-in and when a new version of the software is available, it is automatically downloaded and installed, but users can also get the Adobe Flash Player 23.0.0.185 update from the internet.
According to the change-log, the latest update brings many fixes for:
– Mac: Flash player was quitting unexpectedly while playing Forge of Empires on Firefox(4190467);
– Chrome: Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V didn’t work with CAPS ON in flex (4186251);
– WinXP/Vista: [PPAPI] “Couldn’t load plugin” error appeared when attempting to view Flash content on Opera & Chromium (4186169).
New features have been added, such as:
– Mozilla NPAPI AsyncDrawing Support, which is “the method that the browser and Flash Player use to exchange a bitmap surface where Flash Player draws the SWF content. It is used only when the stage is composited with rest of the content in the browser window. This feature allows wmode “direct” (wmode opaque and transparent) to behave as “windowless” in hardware accelerated async drawing. It is not used in fullscreen mode, or in windowed mode where the plugin draws directly to its own window. If asynchronous drawing is unavailable for any reason, the plugin falls back to using the existing synchronous drawing model”;
– HSTS Support in Flash Player, which will be “particularly helpful when a SWF calls another SWF (child SWF) that is present in HSTS enabled server. Flash Player will acknowledge the STS header in the response and further request to the same domain will always be HTTPS. This feature will be helpful in mitigating protocol hijacking attacks and cookie hijacking”;
– more image formats such as GIF, Progressive JPEG, and PNG;
– real-time dynamic effects with filters for Bevel, Blur, Color Matrix, Convolution, Displacement Map, DropShadow, Glow, Gradient Glow, Gradient Bevel;
– Enhancements to blend modes, radial gradient and stroke etc.
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