Today, Adobe has made available a preview 64-bit release of Flash Player for Windows, Mac and Linux which includes support for IE9.
The new version of Adobe Flash is called "Flash Player Square" and according to Adobe has "been enhanced to directly support the hardware-accelerated graphics capabilities in the newest version of IE." Adobe says the new versions are fully functional, and quite stable, but to remember that everything probably wont" be "fully baked."
The release will run anywhere that Flash 10.1 is supported, specifically pointing out; "Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Mac OS X 10.6, Ubuntu 9.04 or later, versions of RHEL 5, and versions of openSUSE 11 - with Windows XP noticably missing. Not everything is great either, with Adobe saying the following known issues exist in this build:
- Video playback issues may appear on certain websites such as Hulu.com, Audi.co.uk, and nbc.com.
- Mouse interactivity in the Settings UI dialog does not work using Internet Explorer 9. Keyboard navigation works as expected. Please pardon our dust.
- Internet Explorer 9 is not yet final. As such, Adobe is continuing to work with Microsoft to resolve critical issues before the final release of Internet Explorer 9.
- This release will not receive automatic update notifications, and users will need to manually uninstall this preview before installing a standard shipping release of Flash Player
That said, progress towards a full version of 64-bit flash for most platforms is great.
You can download Flash Player "Square" from Adobe"s labs website here.