Adobe has released the very first alpha version of a 64-bit Flash Player for Linux. This move is part of the company's broader plans to provide comprehensive 64-bit support for the widely-used browser plugin. Adobe expects to release 64-bit versions for all three platforms with the next major version of Flash Player.

Although Adobe decided to start with Linux, the company says that 64-bit builds for all three major platforms will be released simultaneously with the next major version of Flash Player. Adobe chose Linux as the starting point because 64-bit software is supported pervasively in the Linux ecosystem and because Linux users have expressed the most demand for 64-bit Flash.

Flash on the Linux platform has traditionally lagged far behind Windows. Adobe has steadily been closing this gap and has publicly committed to making Linux a fully-supported first-tier platform alongside Windows and Mac OS X. During the Flash 9 development cycle, Adobe reworked the player to make it fully cross-platform compatible. Since then, they have mostly provided feature parity between platforms and have consistently made new versions available under Linux. Adobe has also improved Flash performance on Linux with version 10 of the player.

Despite Adobe's efforts to improve the quality of the Flash Player user experience for Linux enthusiasts, the lack of a proper 64-bit version created significant problems. In the early days, 64-bit Linux users had to run 32-bit browsers inside of a chroot jail or use a 32-bit browser linked against a full set of 32-bit libraries. Eventually, nspluginwrapper emerged and provided cross-architecture support for 32-bit browser plugins in some browsers. It worked, but it was a suboptimal solution with a lot of problems.

Flash support in most modern 64-bit Linux distributions is mediocre at best. On my 64-bit Ubuntu 8.04 desktop, I frequently encounter serious Flash bugs that either crash the browser or force me to restart it. This seems to be common—Mozilla's crash report system shows that Flash is the number one cause of Firefox crashes on Linux. Some of these problems faced by Linux users could soon become a thing of the past. The new 64-bit Flash Player works as a native plugin and does not require nspluginwrapper.

"Furthering Adobe's commitment to the Linux community and as part of ensuring the cross-platform compatibility of Flash Player, a pre-release 64-bit Linux version of Adobe Flash Player 10 is now available," the company said in a statement. "This offers easier, native installation on 64-bit Linux systems and removes the need for 32-bit emulation."

I downloaded Flash Player 10 64-bit on my Ubuntu system and tested it with the latest Firefox 3.1 nightly build. The plugin is distributed as a single .so file that is compressed in a tarball. All I had to do was decompress the tarball and put the .so file in the Firefox plugin's directory. It seems to be working reliably so far, and I was able to use it to run several Flash 10 demos, including one with 3D graphics.

Native 64-bit support for Flash Player on Linux is a major win for the Linux community, and it represents Adobe's expanding commitment to treating Linux like a first-class citizen. Additional work remains before the Linux version of Flash Player has full performance parity with the Windows version, but Flash on Linux has clearly come a very long way and is finally starting to feel like a native part of the platform.

The binary is available for download from the Adobe Labs web site. For more details, see Adobe's 64-bit Flash FAQ.