In my years of Director and Flash development, I've noticed only the language is different (Director = Lingo, Flash = ActionScript) and that in Director, you can have actors (symbols in Flash) play...
It could be because the creators wanted a good nameedit:Macromedia used to own flash but Adobe overtook it. However, they decide to keep the same name.
The Flash Player plugin is designed to play embedded Flash content in websites, where as the ActiveX plugin is designed to run commands from either a movie clip or small elements on the site. Things...