On Thursday, a beta version of Flash Player 10 was unveiled by Adobe. The Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux installer can be downloaded from the company’s website.

The new edition of Flash Player brings about an entire series of features and improvements, including Adobe Pixel Blender filters, 3D rendering effects and an engine for text rendering. It also comes with a better hardware graphics acceleration, which should speed up a bit Flash content.

When trying it out, one should keep in mind the fact that, as it is a public beta release, there may still be some bugs and it may not work as smoothly as expected. Any problems one may encounter should be reported on Adobe’s website; user feedback is the best way to correct any abnormalities the new version may have.

The competition is well on its way to launching a beta of the Silverlight 2 Web platform; Microsoft will probably have it finished sometime this summer.

Adobe people are keeping themselves quite busy as last month, the company released a new Media Player along with downloadable and streamable content and instructional videos. The software uses Flash for all video playback, but it also runs on AIR. Both Adobe Media Player and AIR were made available for free download on the company’s website. Adobe also started broadcasting through Adobe TV; the channel provides Adobe application-users with instructional programming.