This probably isn’t big news for many of you (particularly as it came on the same day that IE7 was officially released) but Adobe have released a new beta version of Flash 9 and it includes support for Linux.
Previously, the latest version of Flash available for Linux was version 7. This was fine for a lot of sites (the video player on YouTube, for example, worked without any problems) but there were a number of sites where the designer insisted on the latest and greatest version of Flash before showing you the fruits of their labours (tho’, I suspect that in many cases they didn’t actually use any of the new Flash 8 features and my Flash 7 would have worked just fine if not for their Flash version detection scripts!).
I installed it on a Fedora Core 5 system last night and it seemed to work on the few sites that I tested it on. I can finally see the Sandi Thom site that I complained about back in May. Of course, in the meantime, everyone has forgotten who Sandi Thom is :-)
Of course, most Flash-based sites are horrible and any sane person wouldn’t want to visit them. But it’s nice to be able to make that choice on aethestic rather than technical grounds.