With last week’s release of an Adobe Flash Player update, I visited the Flash Player distribution page in order to download the latest version for my organization. With this release, there was a new option available to download. Previously, I downloaded the Windows ActiveX version for Internet Explorer, the Windows NPAPI version for Firefox, and the Mac OS X NPAPI version for Safari and Firefox.
The new version was a PPAPI version for both Windows and Mac OS X. It is listed as available for Opera and Chromium based applications. It is available as .exe and .msi installers for Windows and a .dmg for OS X.
PPAPI is the Pepper Plugin API within Google Chromium that allows plugins to interact with the browser. As Google Chrome has Adobe Flash Player built-in, a separate Flash installer is not necessary. The new PPAPI plugin installer will allow Opera and Chromium-based applications to use Flash Player. Its presence on the enterprise distribution page also means that PPAPI Flash Player is now available for licensed distribution. While the usefulness of the PPAPI installer might be limited to most, its ability to be distributed could be very important to some developers. The plugin and content debugger has previously been available on the Developer downloads page of the Adobe Flash Player Support Center.