Adobe Flash Player product manager Emmy Huang announced today it’s now Flash player 9!

The features of this release include the ECMAScript Edition 4-based ActionScript 3.0 language and a new ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM2), which dramatically exceeds the performance of previous players. Flash Player 9 is expected to ship with the Flex 2.0 launch this summer. We expect to release an ActionScript 3.0 preview release (public alpha) of the next release of the Flash authoring tool, code-named “BLAZE”, on Adobe Labs around the time of the Flash Player 9 launch.

It’s clear the Flash 9 authoring tool alpha 1 will be released also this summer. By the way, in fact Flash player 8.5 when first time it released (alpha-1), it SWF file inside was named as Flash 9 format already.