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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

#151

Post by ootachi »

justinschuh wrote: post #146
ootachi wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm well aware that, at the moment, the canvas context is restricted to a single thread. But this could be changed. All you have to do is to provide an API to move a canvas context to a different thread/worker. This is quite simple. There's a Mozilla bug on it: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=709490

It requires no more engineering effort than it took to implement the corresponding code in the PPAPI, and probably a lot less. Moreover, non-NaCl and non-plugin code could benefit from it.

As explained before, what would need to be done is simply to expose native versions of the Web APIs. These APIs would mirror the Web APIs more or less exactly (maybe using pointers to buffers instead of typed arrays, for example, but otherwise they'd be the same). In the cases in which Web APIs are not sufficient, both the native and JavaScript versions would be extended. In this way, "performance critical components" of native code and Web content would both benefit.

Re: Flash For Linux Will Only Be Available For Chrome

#153

Post by ruediger »

rmc wrote: post #137
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 agree they would probably benefit from open sourcing it. However I don't think they can. In order to "fully open source" it, they would have to include an open source H264/mp4 decoder. Which would probably not be allowed by everyone who owns H264. Alas.

> In order to "fully open source" it, they would have to include an open source H264/mp4 decoder. Which would probably not be allowed by everyone who owns H264. Alas.

There are existing open source implementations of H264. Even the best encoder (x264) is open source. But I guess there are license issues with third party code/libraries used in Flash.

Re: Flash For Linux Will Only Be Available For Chrome

#154

Post by cookiecaper »

jrockway wrote: post #147
cookiecaper wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Right, YT is one among a handful of exceptions that serve HTML 5 to a desktop browser. That doesn't really change the general argument -- almost all sites are not going to give HTML 5 video as an option to desktop clients.

Re: Flash For Linux Will Only Be Available For Chrome

#155

Post by jrockway »

cookiecaper wrote: post #154
jrockway wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

youtube.com/html5

Right, YT is one among a handful of exceptions that serve HTML 5 to a desktop browser. That doesn't really change the general argument -- almost all sites are not going to give HTML 5 video as an option to desktop clients.

I didn't realize anybody used other sites for video :)

Re: Flash For Linux Will Only Be Available For Chrome

#156

Post by vibrunazo »

gcp wrote: post #102
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…

"Other browsers" have already commented why things like Native Client are absolutely a no-go area. As far as I can tell, the arguments against Pepper run much along the same lines - being dependent on Native Client sure won't help. If you see the arguments against Native Client, it's also obvious using it to be able to keep supporting Flash would be rather...ironic.

What are the arguments against NaCl?

Re: Flash For Linux Will Only Be Available For Chrome

#158

Post by zobzu »

Estragon wrote: post #141
zobzu wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

yes - but implement it in opera, ie, or firefox - you'll find that you've to rearchitecture a lot of your browser - or might as well just grab webkit (of course, in our case you can just try firefox since its the only open source one of the 3)

Re: Flash For Linux Will Only Be Available For Chrome

#159

Post by 9999 »

mburns wrote: post #150
9999 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was not aware of that. Do you have any details on that arrangement? I don't see any record of that in any of their earning reports for the last two years.

My understanding of that arrangement is that it is a mutually beneficial relationship that guarantees that Chrome users have the latest version of Flash (and Chrome is thus more secure) and the Flash Player update adoption happens faster. It makes very little sense to me that Google would pay Adobe for that since Adobe benefits just as much as Google.

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