Adobe Flash Player is a small application developed by Adobe and allows you to view multimedia content and animations in your web browser.
Some application that are made in Adobe Flash can be used within browsers only if you have Adobe Flash Player installed. This is a browser plugin that needs to be installed or already is build in some browsers, such as Google Chrome.
You can play online games, view SWF,FLV files and videos.
Note: Adobe Flash Player is just a piece of software that allows to play applications created with Adobe Flash, so these 2 applications are different. If you are looking alternatives for the development tool – in order to create animations – called Adobe Flash (without “Player”) go to Adobe Flash page.