Adobe tries to stay ahead in Web Tech, introduces hardware acceleration in Flash Plug-in 10.1

With the introduction of HTML5 , it seemed that Adobe System's flash plugin will soon reach its end. But with the release of latest Flash Plugin 10.1, available as RC, Adobe System's finally found a way to keep their Flash Plug-in at the top of the charts. This new plugin introduces hardware decoding support of H.264 videos which will result in a significant reduction of resources and battery consumption.

An important point to note is that hardware acceleration support of H.264 decoding is only available on Windows platform. The reason stated for no support in Linux and Mac is:

Linux currently lacks a developed standard API that supports H.264 hardware video decoding, and Mac OS X does not expose access to the required APIs.

Because of this feature, Flash will significantly reduce the consumption of system resources while watching H.264 videos and playing Flash games. Along with such improvements, Adobe claims that Flash 10.1 will be battery friendly too.

Although support for hardware acceleration is a major improvement in Flash-plugin, but that doesn't mean HTML5 is lagging behind. Recently, there has been a lot of research going on in developing hardware acceleration support for web-apps - Google's Native Client Technology, WebGL(remember the GWT port of Quake-II) and now this Flash Plug-in.

Actually introduction of hardware-acceleration support in Flash 10.1 could be a major reason why Google opted to add built-in Flash support in Chrome Browser. And again, things finally boiled down to improve the capacity of a Browser, making it an ultimate application. With this race of greater technology in Adobe and HTML5, doesn't really matter who is ahead, it is clearly visible that web technologies and end-user experience will grow exponentially making web way better than what it is today.