Lightspark, a free Flash player, available in beta

Lightspark, a FOSS Flash player the developer says is "designed from the ground up to be effi­cient on cur­rent and (hope­fully) future hardware" is now available as a beta version. Lightspark features hardware accelerated OpenGL-based rendering and the beta has almost complete support for the newer version of the Flash script­ing lan­guage, Action­Script 3.0, which was intro­duced in Flash 9. The beta version even includes some performance profiling and debugging tools. In addition to the stand-alone player there is also a Mozilla compatible plug-in.

The developer, Alessandro Pignotti, says the Lightspark code has been written entirely based on the SWF specifications released by Adobe, so there is no reverse engineering involved.

A Lightspark beta is available as an Ubuntu package in a Launchpad PPA repository. Pignotti requests users report any errors that occur with the beta version through the Launchpad bug tracker.

(trk)