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Flash For Linux Will Only Be Available For Chrome

blogs.adobe.com

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Re: Flash For Linux Will Only Be Available For Chrome

#141

Post by Estragon »

zobzu wrote: post #139
Estragon wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google declared Flash dead in Chrome for Android. I'm not part of Google, but i have been studying Native Client pretty closely. I think Google's interest here is that Native Client is designed from the ground up for security. They are happy for Flash to operate through Native Client (which is what the "Pepper" API interfaces), because that largely obviates the security issues it poses. This is excellent news for w…

You made sense until the last 2 sentences. You're saying Google is enforcing whatever it wishes upon others. Aka, non-standard stuff. The Pepper API would be all nice if it wasn't hiding the NaCl vessel. NaCl is a very hard to standardize (yes, being open source has nothing to do with ease of implementation, or proper standards. News at 11.). NaCl is also (one of) the vessel for Google to get more control over the we…

The Native Client source code repository is huge, but it is not that hard to find your way around in. I have been studying it because I plan to build something on top of it. I am by no means a stellar programmer, and I have found it reasonably navigable. (It did take me a few days to get my bearings, though, and I plan to use a much simpler, custom API to minimize the application's attack surface. Haven't looked much at Pepper.)

Re: Flash For Linux Will Only Be Available For Chrome

#143

Post by gexla »

drivebyacct2 wrote: post #126
gexla wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just maybe any improvement makes Flash usable on Linux without crashing the browser. People might actually start enabling Flash on Linux if that happens.

I've used Chrome since it was available for Linux and I've never once had Flash take down the entire browser. In fact, I can't say I've ever had a Flash crash at all in Chrome. Funny enough it crashes rather frequently in Firefox (still doesn't crash the browser itself though...)

Right, it's obviously dependent on a lot of factors. Apple wouldn't even support it on the Iphone. For general users it may work well enough with the right environement, but I use Linux for development and I have little use for Flash compared to the relatively big impact that it has on system resources.

Re: Flash For Linux Will Only Be Available For Chrome

#144

Post by Fargren »

ugh wrote: post #83
buster wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where does Adobe declare Flash on the desktop dead?

In the same place where they declare mobile (a bit of a misnomer, tablets aren't exactly mobile, not much more than notebooks anyway) Flash dead. Flash is appealing because it has features HTML/CSS/JS do not have and because everyone on every platform has it. Since mobile devices are becoming ever more important and Flash is not supported on those devices (or will not be) the second part of that sentence is no longer…

They never did that. They declared the Flash Player for mobile dead. but it's still very viable to make Flash applications for mobile, using AIR.

Re: Flash For Linux Will Only Be Available For Chrome

#146

Post by justinschuh »

ootachi wrote: post #125
justinschuh wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I meant by "naive approaches." Take your example of Pepper API layer versus NPRuntime. When you try to use a sandboxed NPRuntime plugin you hit a hard performance wall with synchronous dispatch overhead. You also introduce huge potential for deadlocks that can be very difficult to detect. This isn't the kind of thing you notice in a simple simple proof-of-concept or casual discussion, but it becomes pain…

So extend the Web APIs to handle this. You don't have to do synchronous calls. Robert O'Callahan talked in that thread about the potential for extending the capabilities of Web Workers to allow the kind of things you want to do to be done asynchronously. I know I'd love to have the ability to render to a 2D or 3D canvas context in a Web Worker, for example (the kind of thing that sandboxed plugins want to do), but al…

PPAPI is a platform for plugins to safely port existing native code, and implement performance critical components. The PPAPI platform capabilities (audio, canvas, webgl, etc) already exist as regular JavaScript APIs in Chrome. So, if you want to use them on normal web content you can. However, in doing so you incur both the strengths and limitations of the web platform (e.g. JavaScript dispatch, IPC overhead, and a single-threaded execution context).

You gave the example of using canvas from a web worker. Unfortunately, the whole web platform is built on the assumption of a single-threaded execution pipeline. Web workers get around this by using postMessage and not having access to the DOM, shared variables, and other stateful parts of the platform. Canvas and WebGl as spec'd and implemented are tied to these stateful parts of the platform (DOM, etc.), which is why you cannot use them from a worker.

So, your desired change would involve either a major overhaul of the web as spec'd and implemented, or a change to the Canvas and WebGL standards. The first is probably not going to happen. The second is achievable and implementable, but wouldn't help address the use cases I described in my first sentence.

Re: Flash For Linux Will Only Be Available For Chrome

#147

Post by jrockway »

cookiecaper wrote: post #133
yardie wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I watch plenty of videos and I've never had a problem with the big streaming sites delivering h264 versions. The only flash videos I still encounter are on older, lightly, maintained sites or sites that just download flv files. And if iPad sales are any indication I don't think it's as big a deal as you make it out to be.

People won't serve you HTML 5 video unless you impersonate a mobile device. It's still a problem if you don't want to change your user-agent every time you visit a website and just cross your fingers that they think you're mobile and therefore serve up HTML 5 (and as others have pointed out, often in a format that non-Chrome won't play anyway).

youtube.com/html5

Re: Flash For Linux Will Only Be Available For Chrome

#148

Post by lookelsewhere »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #68
bwarp wrote: post #6

I get the feeling this isn't going to be that much of a problem. I've not got the flash plugin installed in Firefox and I'm not finding any great hardship these days. Perhaps it'll kill Flash a bit quicker considering the amount of Kiosks and Internet cafes running Firefox+Flash on Linux.

The real reason it'll not be much of a problem is that the current Flash 11.2 plugins won't spontaneously disappear when the next version gets released. Indeed they'll have 5 more years of security updates. So the only thing non-Chrome-using Linux users will miss out on are things that use the new features of Flash introduced after that date.

That makes sense. I was starting to wonder if this was the end of flash for Mozilla on major websites like YouTube, but 5 years is a really long time for support. Hopefully, we'll see an emergence of widespread html5 use by then and not have to worry about having proprietary web technologies working.

Re: Flash For Linux Will Only Be Available For Chrome

#149

Post by marshray »

eps wrote: post #124
radarsat1 wrote: post #107

You know, it's strange that Adobe hasn't considered, at this point in time, open-sourcing the Flash player. Please, hear me out, because I don't just mean this as an HH (Hopeful Hacker), but also as a well-thought-out IBD (Intelligent Business Decision): Flash has obviously been very beneficial to them in the long run. It has given them the only remaining well-controlled proprietary piece of the web. This helps them…

That's a rather naive way of looking at it. The name - Flash Player - is deceptive. Player is what users see and what it appears to be doing, but in reality it is much more than that. It is a content delivery system, and the Player is an essential part of it that is expected to play by the rules - DRM, collaborative p2p delivery, licensing, etc. 10% (maybe) of the player is about playback , the rest is what users don…

For everyone I know Flash amounts to YouTube, Ustream, some other video sites, and some web games.

Streaming video will work just fine with HTML5 or just an old fashioned browser video plugin. A lot of the Flash web games will be missed, but my sense is that the vast majority of those people are using Windows and Mac.

The day is coming when very few new projects will be started in Flash and it will go the way of Silverlight.

Re: Flash For Linux Will Only Be Available For Chrome

#150

Post by mburns »

9999 wrote: post #127
radarsat1 wrote: post #107

You know, it's strange that Adobe hasn't considered, at this point in time, open-sourcing the Flash player. Please, hear me out, because I don't just mean this as an HH (Hopeful Hacker), but also as a well-thought-out IBD (Intelligent Business Decision): Flash has obviously been very beneficial to them in the long run. It has given them the only remaining well-controlled proprietary piece of the web. This helps them…

I've been wondering why they haven't done this for a very, very long time. The player itself has not been a source of revenue for Adobe for quite some time (they used to license Flash Lite to handset manufacturers and made money off of that), instead they make all their money by selling tools to make content for that runtime. I'm hoping someone from Adobe is reading this, because I've never really heard a rational bu…

>The player itself has not been a source of revenue for Adobe for quite some time

Google pays lots of money for Adobe to auto opt-in Flash installs with Chrome.

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