[superblue]

Flash player 7 beta available here -

http://www.macromedia.com/software/f...release_notes/

"Video performance has been improved in the player by 15-70%"

Could this be the Flash speed performance boost we've been hoping for on OS X? Only one way to find out...

[cpac]

but where do we download it?

[Art Vandelay]

Go up a directory.

[superblue]

http://www.macromedia.com/software/f...r/public_beta/

[superblue]

Well unfortunately I can't say I notice any drastic improvement. Still pales in comparison to performace on the lesser Windows systems in my office. What a letdown

(G4 733/GeForce 2 MX/1.25GB RAM/10.2.6/Safari 1.0/IE 5.2)

[Adam Betts]

Originally posted by superblue:
Well unfortunately I can't say I notice any drastic improvement. Still pales in comparison to performace on the lesser Windows systems in my office. What a letdown

Even MacOS X Public Beta is faster than this.

SVG is looking better and better these days.

[cpac]

Originally posted by superblue:
Well unfortunately I can't say I notice any drastic improvement. Still pales in comparison to performace on the lesser Windows systems in my office. What a letdown

(G4 733/GeForce 2 MX/1.25GB RAM/10.2.6/Safari 1.0/IE 5.2)

Did you actually do the un-install of v.6? I didn't and though the installer completed successfully, I still had v.6 and not the v7 beta.

Having just used both versions in a row on the same site, I can say that v.7 is noticeably faster. No windows box at home to compare it to though.

[Art Vandelay]

I didn't have to uninstall v.6 here. The v.7 installer overwrote it.

[superblue]

I didn't uninstall 6, but it definitely installed 7 as I get the 'about macromedia Flash Player 7' when right clicking a movie.

[cowerd]

SVG is looking better and better these days.

Yeah, cause that SVG plug-in doesn't suck ass. That was sarcasm. Notice how SVG is suddenly buried deeper and deeper at Adobe's website. Now need papal dispensation to run the SVG demos.

[Adam Betts]

Originally posted by cowerd:
Yeah, cause that SVG plug-in doesn't suck ass. That was sarcasm. Notice how SVG is suddenly buried deeper and deeper at Adobe's website. Now need papal dispensation to run the SVG demos.

SVG doesn't suck ass comparing to SWF. SVG is not buried deeper and deeper at Adobe's website. They've been at the same place for a long time. More and more websites are switching to SVG (slowly but stable). If you want to see some SVG-powered Websites, check http://www.adobe.com/svg/community/external.html

I don't have any insider information but I can tell that Adobe is waiting for people's satisfaction of Flash SWF to go all-time low then they would release new version of SVG.

Just study their strategy on Indesign/Quark.

[Mediaman_12]

Humm? must just me then. I was about to say how much quicker this version of flash is. the flash parts of Macromida's home page now load almost as fast as the HTML parts.
As for SVG although the concept is better (Using open XML instead of a binary format, unfortunately the XML will always be bigger than the equivalent binary) I have never had a good experience with it. It always being about 10 times slower than the equivalent Flash.
Does Safari even support SVG without a plugin like Mozilla used to? Has SVG support been cut out of Firebird?
Lack of any sort of user support will be the death of SVG, A version of Flash has been part of 'most' default OS installs for ages. The user has to actively remove Flash support, whereas with SVG the user has to still go and get the plugin.
Although this latest version of the Flash plugin is the biggest yet (the Mac version weighing in at over 1MB and the Win version being slightly smaller at about 900kb), it now includes a auto update system. which should mean less of the 'monumental' manual upgrades and more small 'auto patches' to add or update individual features.

[Wevah]

The mouse cursor seems to update properly in Gecko browsers now.

[Jim Paradise]

Mediaman_12, it's not just you. I've found a significant speed up even on my Powerbook where Flash wasn't a slouch before.

[Superchicken]

does Adobe even have anything to write SVG propperly?

I really wish that Macromedia would take what Fireworks does and intigrate it into flash. If you could put in things lke inner shadows, and glows, and such into a flash file, that would render on the end user's side, sure it would require a decent speed computer to veiw, BUT it would decrease the load time more than enough to make up for it! Think about it instead of having a huge bitmap file, you could just have a vector with a little bit more info added like, drop shadow, 6 pixels away, 180 degrees, 80% opacity, and 3 pixels blurred. Or something.

Would be SOO much easier for those working with flash to do high quality looks without having to use so many work arounds just to make something look good.

[shortcipher]

definitely faster, or perhaps just making better use of the CPU. On an Actionscript intensive movie I have the new player runs at 25fps where the old player would only run at 16fps.

[superblue]

I seem to be finding no speed improvements in Safari and IE, but after downloading Omniweb 4.5, I CAN see an improvement in Flash playback speed there. What's that all about?!?! Any ideas?

[shortcipher]

Originally posted by superblue:
I seem to be finding no speed improvements in Safari and IE, but after downloading Omniweb 4.5, I CAN see an improvement in Flash playback speed there. What's that all about?!?! Any ideas?

Safari seem to have an upper frame rate limit of 25fps, no matter what I do I cannot get Safari to run Flash movies any faster, Omniweb does not seem to do this, plus its better use of threading gives more priority to the Flash plugin, resulting in better performance.

The performance difference is only really apparent in really heavy Actionscript, most normal movies seem to play much the same.