This evening the Flash Player team launched Flash Player 9 Update 3 (9,0,115,0) for Windows, Mac and Linux. Flash Player 9.0.115 is now available through all of the normal distribution means.

There is a LOT packed in to this dot release, so let me point you to our overview article. But some of the big ticket items are:

Flash Player Cache - A new mechanism for caching the Flex framework to make Flex applications small and fast.

H.264 and HE-AAC - Support for playback of H.264 content including many MP4, MOV, and 3GP files.

Hardware scaling - Using the GPU to scale any rectangular portion of the screen to fill the monitor (and fast!). David Hassoun also wrote an amazing article on H.264 support in Flash Player.

Multicore support - Getting more of those processors to pull their own weight and make Flash playback even better.

Leopard support - We official start supporting Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard with this release.

As part of the launch, we’ve updated the Flash Player homepage to make is easier to find new articles and technotes relevant to Flash development. We’ve also updated the Flash Player feature demo to show off some of the new features that are available in 9.0.115. As always, for a full list of features and known issues, please check the Release Notes.

Finally, there are some security model changes that needed to be made in Flash Player 9.0.115. To understand how this may impact your work, take a took at Deneb Meketa’s article on the Flash Player Developer Center.