Adobe has just made available the upcoming Flash Player that the company calls "Square." This preview includes support for two new areas, namely enhanced support for Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 Beta and native 64-bit support for all major desktop operating systems including Linux, Mac, and Windows. As part of Adobe's collaboration with Microsoft's Internet Explorer team over the past few months, Flash Player "Square" has been enhanced to directly support the hardware-accelerated graphics capabilities in the newest version of IE.

In Adobe's internal testing, the company has seen significant improvements in Flash Player graphics performance = exceeding 35% in Internet Explorer 9 Beta compared to Flash Player running in previous versions of IE. While the performance improvements will vary based on the type of content and how it's created, bitmap-heavy content for Flash Player will experience the greatest benefit, Adobe said. Content created for Flash Player that's embedded as transparent (wmode="transparent") will also run more efficiently given the benefits of offloading the HTML and Flash content compositing to the GPU. The Flash Player "Square" can be downloaded here

Adobe today is also sharing a refresh of the Linux 64-bit version of Flash Player together with the first preview of both the 64-bit Windows and Mac versions. The company encourages users of 64-bit browsers to install the 64-bit version of Flash Player and give it try. Those using the previous 64-bit version of Flash Player for Linux should find this new version even faster and more reliable, ADobe added. These new versions are fully functional.