Official – Adobe Flash 9 for Linux will exist

This may not affect many of you given I’m one of the few people I know that uses Linux for pretty much everything, but this is absolutely fantastic news from Adobe.

Yes, Adobe is actively working on the Linux version of Flash Player 9. We expect to make a pre-release version available on Adobe Labs for early feedback and testing before the end of the year, with the full release expected in early 2007*. As delivering consistency across platforms is a core value of Flash Player, performance is one of the main goals of the Linux release.

^{Emmy Huang – Product Manager for Flash Player at Adobe}

This is great. The current version of Flash for Linux platforms from Adobe is only Flash 7, and it really is poor as far as performance goes. In fact, on my little laptop just playing a Google Video movie in the browser with nothing else running will make the CPU fan kick in to Overdrive.

So hopefully we can get to the point where its not only as responsive as the Windows/Mac versions, but also doesn’t chew through the system resources as badly as it does right now.

_{Found via Digg}