Adobe® Flash® Player is the high-performance, lightweight, highly expressive client runtime that delivers powerful and consistent user experiences across major operating systems, browsers, mobile phones, and devices.
Flash is the world's most pervasive software platform, reaching 97% of Internet-enabled desktops worldwide, as well as many popular devices. Since it is free of the design restrictions of more traditional Web display options, you can use it to clearly and exactly express your brand and company identity.

Adobe® (formerly Macromedia) Flash Player - the universal rich client for delivering effective Adobe Flash experiences across desktops and devices. Lets you view the best animation and entertainment on the Web. It displays Web application front-ends, high-impact Web site user interfaces, interactive online advertising, and short-form to long-form animation.

Adobe's Flash Player allows you to view interactive web content like games, business presentations, advertisements. The package includes only the Flash Player and is a standalone installation. Technically, this is a Flash Player ActiveX Control. It will only play the file through your Web browser.

Installed on over 700 million Internet-connected desktops and mobile devices, Flash Player enables organizations and individuals to build and deliver great digital experiences to their end users.

Flash is the world's most pervasive software platform, reaching 97% of Internet-enabled desktops worldwide, as well as many popular devices. Since it is free of the design restrictions of more traditional Web display options, you can use it to clearly and exactly express your brand and company identity.

The beta contains several new features:
* Support for H.264 video and HE-AAC audio codecs .
* Enhancements to full-screen mode to use hardware scaling for improved video performance and quality on systems running Windows 2000 and newer or Mac OS X 10.2 and newer.
* Faster rendering of vector graphics on multi-core CPUs.
* Higher quality and performance for downscaling large bitmaps (SWF 9 only).
* Support for caching common platform components, such as the Flex framework, to reduce average application sizes. This feature is enabled in the Flex 3 beta available on Adobe Labs.
* Support for full-screen mode on Linux.

Also included in this update:
* Recursive calling to and from JavaScript via the External Interface API is now permitted (not available in Opera or Netscape).
* Runtime errors can now be thrown from JavaScript to Action Script via the External Interface API.
* HTTP requests from the Flash Player ActiveX Control in some versions of Internet Explorer did not include the Accept-Language header. The ActiveX Control now always inserts this header.
* Support for Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSAA) in the Windows plug-in.