Adobe Flash Player

Adobe Flash Player ( labeled Shockwave Flash in Internet Explorer and FireFox ) is Freeware software for viewing multimedia, executing rich Internet applications, and streaming video and audio, content created on the Adobe Flash platform. Flash Player can run from a web browser ( as a browser  plug-in ) or on supported mobile devices, but there also exist versions running directly on an operating system intended both for regular users and content developers, denoted with the Projector ( or Standalone ) and Debugger name suffixes, respectively. Flash Player runs SWF files that can be created by the Adobe Flash Professional authoring tool, by Adobe Flex or by a number of other Macromedia and third party tools. Flash Player was created by Macromedia and now developed and distributed by Adobe Systems after its acquisition.

Flash Player supports vector and raster graphics, 3D graphics, an embedded scripting language called ActionScript executed in ActionScript Virtual Machine, and streaming of video and audio. ActionScript is based on ECMA Script, and supports object-oriented code, and may be compared to JavaScript. Flash Player has a wide user base, with over 90% penetration on internet connected personal computers, and is a common format for games, animations, and GUIs embedded into web pages. Adobe Systems, the developer of Adobe Flash Player, states that more than 400 million of total more than 1 billion connected desktops update to the new version of Flash Player within six weeks of release.

Flash Player can be downloaded for free and its plug-in version is available for recent versions of web browsers ( such asInternet Explorer, Mozilla FireFox, Google Chrome, Opera and Safari ) on selected platforms. Google Chrome distribution comes bundled with the sandboxed Adobe Flash plug-in and will continue to support the plug-in in Windows 8 Metro mode. Each version of Adobe Flash Player is backwards-compatible.

http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer.html