Adobe has released a pre-release version of Flash Player 10, code-named “Astro,” which introduces new expressive features and visual & network performance improvements for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux OS.

Key features of Adobe Flash Player 10 include:

+ Custom Filters and Effects
+ 3D Effects: Animate any 2D display object through 3D space
+ Color Management
+ GPU Compositing: Hardware compositing takes advantage of the tremendous memory bandwidth and computational horsepower of the GPU, reducing the load on the CPU, and can provide a performance boost to many graphically intense applications
+ Anti-Aliasing Engine
+ Dynamic Streaming: Always show the best video possible with streams that can automatically adjust to changing network conditions such as low bandwidth.
+ RTMFP (Real Time Media Flow Protocol)
+ Speex Audio Codec: Low latency audio streaming
+ Ubuntu OS Support — Supports Ubuntu, one of the most popular flavors of Linux.

You will not notice much improvements yet with Flash Player 10 since it requires the website hosting the flash content to utilize these changes in the streaming application.

Before installing this pre-release version of Flash Player, make sure to uninstall any older version of Flash Player 9 from Add/Remove programs. Click here to download Adobe Flash Player 10 for your OS version.