I don’t want to be rude, but I’m a Flash developer (and enthusiast) since 5 years now, and I didn’t see any improvement in the Flash Player performances.
I mean, obviously, Action Script 3 provided a huge gain of speed in term of code execution, but the drawing performances are always really incapacitating for large projects.

I won’t even speak of the Flash Player performances on OSX, which are totally catastrophic.
In France, for most people, Flash is synonym of huge CPU usage for just a banner that could be done in DHTML or for a video that could be played with another plugin such as DivX or… Silverlight.
A LOT of people are really glad that Safari for iPhone doesn’t support Flash.
It’s really sad, since it’s not totally true, and often a conception issue more than a player one, but there’s a part of truth beyond these predjudices.

I’m actually quite disappointed, since I _really_ love the Flash Platform and its community, but have to use C# instead of Flex+AIR for my later projects at work, because of this performance issue.

I really hope Flash Player 11 won’t be a new show-case of stunning new functionalities, but a real optimized version of the player.

With all due respect, and my excuses for my approximative english.

Although I agree developers should be mindful not to use too many resources (something that, I believe, contributed to flash developers being some of the best coders in the industry), there’s a lot that Adobe could be doing to make our jobs easier.

For example, just take a look at what someone like Joa Ebert has been doing with TAAS (http://blog.joa-ebert.com/tag/taas/ ). He’s written a swf bytecode optimizer that makes clean, readable, well written code run as fast as the hackiest, short-cuttiest, ultra-optimized actionscript.

It’s hard not to question Adobe for not doing this for us in the first place.

I mean, if you look at the before & after diagrams, there’s a lot of room for improvement in compiled bytecode. It shouldn’t have to fall (solely) on the developer to ruin his beautiful code just to save a few CPU cycles/megs of RAM.