Linux Flash Player 9

In 2007, Adobe Flash Player 9 for Linux delivered a consistent cross-platform experience and extends unprecedented performance and advanced features to the broadest set of developers and users to date. Additionally, Linux developers could create, test and deploy rich Internet applications on the Linux platform using the free Adobe Flex 2 Software Developers Kit, Adobe Flash Player 9 and Flex Data Services 2 Express. Linux Flash Player 9 enhanced user experiences with new capabilities such as efficient memory utilization, advanced features for graphics, video and text, as well as the ActionScript Virtual Machine, which allows up to ten times faster scripting performance. Adobe contributed source code to the Mozilla Foundation, which hosted a new open source project called Tamarin to accelerate the development of a standards-based approach for creating rich and engaging Web applications that work across multiple platforms.

About the Tamarin Project

The Tamarin project was an initiative hosted by the Mozilla Foundation, with significant contribution from Adobe Systems. It aimed to implement a high-performance, open-source virtual machine for executing programs written in ECMAScript 4th edition (ES4). ECMAScript is the standardized version of JavaScript, a language primarily used for web development.

Adobe donated the source code for its ActionScript Virtual Machine to the Mozilla Foundation in 2006. ActionScript is Adobe's dialect of ECMAScript, used primarily in its Flash technology. This source code, rebranded as the Tamarin project, was meant to be integrated into future versions of Mozilla's SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine, used in Firefox.

Tamarin's goal was to increase the performance of JavaScript in the browser, making more complex web applications and richer user experiences possible. It was also intended to foster better cooperation between the Flash and web development communities by unifying their scripting languages.

However, by 2008, Mozilla and Adobe had largely abandoned plans to integrate Tamarin into Firefox due to technical difficulties. The ECMAScript 4th edition standard, which Tamarin aimed to implement, was also scaled back by the ECMAScript standards committee in favor of a less radical evolution of the language, known as ECMAScript 5, and later, ECMAScript 6 (ES6) and beyond.

Tamarin is no longer an active project, and its goals of integrating the Flash and JavaScript communities and of using an ES4-based virtual machine in Firefox have not been realized. Nevertheless, the project represents an important historical moment in the ongoing evolution of JavaScript and web technologies.