Adobe Suggests Disabled Hardware Acceleration for Flash Player in OS X Lion

TUAW reports that Adobe has posted a list of known issues for its products running on OS X Lion. The list is unfortunately extensive, but the company's discussion of Flash Player issues stands out for the revelation that OS X Lion may have disabled hardware acceleration.


"Flash Player may cause higher CPU activity when playing a YouTube video. Possibly related to disabled hardware acceleration."

Other issues with Flash Player include a loss of response to mouse clicks in the setting dialog and problems with animation of custom native mouse cursors. 

In addition to the Flash Player issues, Adobe's support document lists a number of other issues with its products under OS X Lion, as well as a few general notes for users to be aware of: 

- With OS X Lion now hiding the user Library folder by default, users may need to use Finder's "Go to Folder" command to access preferences and other user settings for Adobe applications. Alternatively, users can use the command line to make the Library folder permanently visible. 

- OS X Lion's new reverse scrolling may throw off some users, not just in Adobe's applications but across the entire experience. Reverse scrolling can be disabled in System Preferences. 

- A lack of Rosetta support in OS X Lion means that some older Adobe software such as CS2 or earlier will not run on the new operating system. 

- Adobe is considering how it may adopt some of OS X Lion's new features such as Autosave, Restore, Versioning, Full Screen Mode, and new multi-touch gestures, but they haven't been implemented yet. Adobe specifically notes that the Restore feature which reopens all windows and files to their previous state when an application is relaunched does not function on Adobe applications. 

Update: Adobe corrected their post to say that hardware accelerated Flash is supported in Lion.

"The final release of Mac OS X Lion (10.7) provides the same support for Flash hardware video acceleration as Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6). The previous “Known Issue” described in a tech note suggesting that video hardware acceleration was disabled in Lion was incorrect and based on tests with a pre-release version of Mac OS X Lion that related to only one particular Mac GPU configuration. We continue to work closely with Apple to provide Flash Player users with a high quality experience on Mac computers."

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