Adobe is clearly determined to match Microsoft Silverlight all the way and has made a number of announcements regarding new versions of its Flash player.

To begin with Adobe have now released the Flash Player 9 update 3 which adds support for H.264 standard video as seen in Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. With new hardware acceleration and multi-processor support, and new associated Media Server options, this promises to lift the ceiling for web video quality and to match Microsoft's Silverlight 1.0's handling.

Well it had to happen. With Microsoft pushing Silverlight on the basis of its superior video handling, Adobe had to respond. And rather than waiting for the next release of the CS apps it's updated the existing Flash Player 9 ...

Tom Arah examines what the recent Flash-based developments mean for the future.

Amazingly, the Flash SWF format’s rise to dominance began with its ability to embed simple, cartoon-style vector animations into HTML web pages to give them a bit of a lift...