For many, many years there’s been a 64-bit version of Internet Explorer available to users. The problem is that there was no 64-bit version of Flash Player, this meant your experience online was so broken that nobody really used it. This all changes today with Adobe’s release of a new 64-bit Flash player preview dubbed "Square”.
As well as being 64-bit, Square also has enhanced support for Microsoft’s latest announcement – IE9 beta.
Internet Explorer 9 hardware accelerated rendering support — Enhanced support for Internet Explorer 9 Beta. It takes advantage of hardware accelerated graphics in Internet Explorer 9 Beta, utilizing hardware rendering surfaces to improve graphics performance and enable seamless composition.
The need for a 64-bit browser would currently be a pretty narrow use case, but as we move to more and more complex applications arriving in the browser, this may become very useful going forward. As many people know 64-bit OS’s great advantage is to take advantage of more than 4GB of RAM.
A number of service providers are now offering online spreadsheets, these include Google Docs and Office Live to name a few. Transforming large and complex calculations are currently something reserved for the desktop, but its entirely possible to see a future where online spreadsheets become just as capable as their local counterparts. This scenario would lend itself to being able to access further hardware acceleration via a 64-bit enabled browser.
Video editing online isn’t yet a serious option, but many suspect its just a matter of time. The image editing available via web apps of today, seemed impossible even 12 months ago. So what if there was a video editing application in the browser that could tap into local hardware resources. What would more interesting is if the load could be shared between server-side and local processing.
With the ‘need’ for a 64-bit browser is really a couple of years away, its important we get started on development now, so the browser and plugins aren’t the limiting factor in web / software development. The Square preview is available for all platforms – PC, Mac and Linux.
More @ http://labs.adobe.com/
