Differnce in two forms of Adobe Flash Player 11.8?

[Guest]

What is the diference between Adobe Flash Player 11.8  & Adobe Flash Player 11.8 Beta?

[Colin Holgate]

It looks like 11.8 is released then, if it shows in the normal download page. You can see that the build number of the release one is 94, and the beta is 115. The release notes for 115 are here:

http://labsdownload.adobe.com/pub/labs/flashruntimes/shared/air3-8_flashplayer11-8_releasenotes.pdf

though it’s not very clear which things are new to 115 that were not in 94.

[jeromiec83223024]

Here's what the general plan is:

• Ship a feature-bearing dot-release every 3 months
• If necessary: monthly Patch Release to address functional or security issues

When we ship a public release, we typically do two things with the beta channel:

• Bump the version number and ship the release build to the Beta Channel ASAP
  • It's the same bits, but the build listens to the Beta Channel for update notifications
  • This saves you the trouble of uninstalling/reinstalling to switch from the Beta to Release and then back.
  • You'll automatically get the release-equivalent bits if you're opted in to automatic updates

• Start pushing out builds for the next maintenance release
  
  
  • These tend to be pretty boring releases that include targeted fixes to address any stability issues that we might see from aggregate crash reporting, and any functional issues that might come up.
    
    
  • The 3MM+ people on the beta channel generate enough traffic that we can get good statistical data on stability
    • This gives us the capability to both try and validate blind fixes to issues that aren't consistently reproducible (A video playback bug with a 1 in 5000 chance to hit, for instance.)
    • Similarly, we can identify new stability issues early in the release.  Even most low reproducibility and hardware-dependent issues like the one described above are both pretty obvious within 2-3 days of shipping a beta build.

[jeromiec83223024 · Accepted solution]

Also, we publish weekly announcements to the Beta forum with a description of changes:

http://forums.adobe.com/community/labs/flashruntimes/flashplayer#

If you subscribe to the page by clicking Recieve Email Notifications in the right-hand column, you'll get an email when a new announcement is posted.

Right now we're in a pretty boring part of the cycle, but things will pick up over the next few weeks.