Although I applaud the efforts of Adobe to make their, as noted, slow Flash player a bit faster I think that the software community at large would benefit greatly from shifting over to HTML 5 <video support. Although this is a few years out in terms of practical usage, the browser-support for video could eliminate much of the need to speed Flash up as the slow downs come from Flash video. Speeding Flash up will help in the short term, but probably be meaningless in the long run to the common user. Flash would be better served to start finding new uses for its software as HTML 5 might be a solid and more maintainable alternative to Flash in the near future.

I know Broadcom as a maker of ethernet controllers and server chipsets. What has Broadcom got that is common in netbooks and can accelerate Flash?

Smells like a response to Microsoft’s very own silverlight 3 being hardware accelerated

Then we are also going to see the Super Flash security hole?

For BB, the logical answer I think is that the designers of flash didn't want a situation to arise where having hardware acceleration was required in order to view flash content.

One of the things that makes flash so good is that it shows content across different hardware and software platforms in a consistent manner. Adding hardware assist may end up hurting more then helping if it ends up being required to view some content. If it is just a perk you get if your PC has hardware acceleration available then it's impact will be less likely to fracture flash's performance on different systems.

Flash has always been slow, and I always wondered why it never used hardware acceleration before to compensate. It's about 10 years old and only NOW they're thinking about it?