even without Flash Player. Mainland China-specific variant Starting with version 30, Adobe stopped distributing Flash Player directly to users from mainland China. Instead, they selected 2144.cn as a partner and released a special variant of Flash Player on a specific website, which contains a non-closable process, known as the "Flash Helper Service", that collects private information and pops up advertisement window contents, by receiving and running encrypted programs from a remote server. The partnership started in about 2017, but in version 30, Adobe disabled the usage of vanilla (global) variant of Flash Player in mainland China, forcing users to use that specific variant, which may pose a risk to its users due to Internet censorship by Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This only affected Chinese Chromium based browser users, Firefox users, and Internet Explorer users using Windows 7 and below, as Microsoft still directly distributed Flash Player for Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge through Windows Update in Windows 8 and upward at the time. Starting in 2021, however, this variant is the only publicly supported version of Flash Player. Release history FutureSplash Player 1.1 New scripting features Option to disable the menu and memory management optimizations Macromedia Flash Player 2 (June 17, 1997) Mostly vectors and motion, some bitmaps, limited audio Support of stereo sound, enhanced bitmap integration, buttons, the Library, and the ability to tween color changes Macromedia Flash Player 3 (May 31, 1998) Added alpha transparency, licensed MP3 compression Brought improvements to animation, playback, digital art, and publishing, as well as the introduction of simple script commands for interactivity Macromedia Flash Player 4 (June 15, 1999) Saw the introduction of streaming MP3s and the Motion Tween. Initially, the Flash Player plug-in was not bundled with popular web browsers and users had to visit Macromedia website to download it. As of 2000, however, the Flash Player was already being distributed with all AOL, Netscape and Internet Explorer browsers. Two years later it shipped with all releases of Windows XP. The install-base of the Flash Player reached 92 percent of all Internet users. Macromedia Flash Player 5 (August 24, 2000) A major advance in ability, with the evolution of Flash's scripting abilities as released as ActionScript Saw the ability to customize the authoring environment's interface Macromedia Generator was the first initiative from Macromedia to separate design from content in Flash files. Generator 2.0 was released in April 2001, and featured real-time