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The Adobe Flash Player is a widely distributed proprietary multimedia and application player
created by Macromedia and now developed and distributed by Adobe after its acquisition. Flash
Player
runs SWF files that can be created by the Adobe Flash authoring tool, by Adobe Flex or by a number
of other Macromedia and third party tools.
Adobe Flash, or simply Flash, refers to both a multimedia authoring program and the Adobe Flash
Player, written and distributed by Adobe, that uses vector and raster graphics, a native scripting
language called ActionScript and bidirectional streaming of video and audio. Strictly speaking,
Adobe Flash is the authoring environment and Flash Player is the virtual machine used to run the
Flash files, but in colloquial language these have become mixed:  Flash  can mean either the
authoring environment, the player, or the application files.
Flash Player has support for an embedded scripting language called ActionScript  AS , which is
based on ECMAScript. Since its inception, ActionScript has matured from a script syntax without
variables to one that supports object-oriented code, and may now be compared in capability to
JavaScript  another ECMAScript-based scripting language .
The Flash Player was originally designed to display 2-dimensional vector animation, but has since
become suitable for creating rich Internet applications and streaming video and audio. It uses
vector graphics to minimize file size and create files that save bandwidth and loading time. Flash
is a common format for games, animations, and GUIs embedded into web pages.
The Flash Player is built into some browsers and is available as a plugin for recent versions of
other browsers  such as Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Safari and Internet Explorer  on selected platforms.
Each version of the plugin is completely backwards-compatible.