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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

#121

Post by 0x0 »

justinschuh wrote: post #91
shimon_e wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the press release it seems NPAPI is OS dependent while Pepper is less so. This all assume there is actually going to be something more than security updates after 11.2 for other platforms. And that it is going to be something we would want on Linux.

>From the press release it seems NPAPI is OS dependent while Pepper is less so. Correct. The NPAPI version of Flash is very platform-dependent; whereas Pepper Flash is almost completely platform neutral, and Chrome OS needs most of the same Pepper platform bits anyway. So, our maintenance overhead for Pepper Flash on Linux is very small. On top of that, Linux is broadly deployed throughout Google (and is very popular…

Flash provides a lot of hardware abstractions, from H.264 accelerated video, to webcam and microphone access, and accelerated 3d (openGL) rendering. Does the Pepper API provide wrappers for all this stuff? Otherwise it would seem that Flash for Linux would still need to carry a lot of platform-dependent plumbing.

Re: Flash For Linux Will Only Be Available For Chrome

#122

Post by alanh »

shimon_e wrote: post #59
gcp wrote: post #40

I can't make much sense of this. Adobe declared Flash dead. Apple declared Flash dead. Google declared Flash dead in Chrome for Android. Now, they're going to continue working on Flash, but only on a new API that is implemented only in a single browser in Linux (and from statements from Apple and Mozilla, will stay that way), but keeping it compatible with the old NPAPI on Windows? What I don't even.... Edit: Could i…

They are basically saying due to Pepper there is no or little work in getting flash to work in Chrome on Linux... so there will be continued support. The real question is if this is true, why are they dropping flash for android?

There are definitely other reasons. Remember "Thoughts on Flash" [1]?

“First, there’s Open… Rather than use Flash, Apple has adopted HTML5…” — and CSS3, SVG, and HTML5 have indeed provided most of the capabilities that once were Flash’s domain.

“Third, there’s reliability, security and performance.” — which is really three things, each of which Flash has an outstandingly poor track record with.

“Fourth, there’s battery life.”

“Fifth, there’s Touch. ¶ Flash was designed for PCs using mice, not for touch screens using fingers. For example, many Flash websites rely on ‘rollovers’…”

[1]: http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

Re: Flash For Linux Will Only Be Available For Chrome

#123

Post by windsurfer »

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…

There are over 70 patents and licensed libraries in Flash. It would basically be impossible to get those companies to agree to open source and give away all their IP. For a while, Adobe was paying over a dollar per Android Flash install because some of their licenses only applied to desktop.

So one might say they should open source the core of Flash, the JIT compiler and virtual machine, and not the parts that are licensed. And you're right, that would be the correct move! They did that in 2006: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamarin_%28software%29

They also open sourced the Flex SDK: http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Flex+SDK

What Adobe needs is a completely new product that is available to consumers for free, has it's source code public and free from patents. This way, Adobe tools can still be sold and used to develop, while the player is ubiquitous and as widely spread as possible. And that's what they're trying to do with HTML5: http://www.adobe.com/solutions/html5.html

Adobe's communication to developers is bad. No one knows about any this. Technology isn't their problem, marketing is.

Re: Flash For Linux Will Only Be Available For Chrome

#124

Post by eps »

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't really see, but what is of a huge value to Adobe. Guess what will be stripped off the second the player open sourced? Why would Adobe want that.

Re: Flash For Linux Will Only Be Available For Chrome

#125

Post by ootachi »

justinschuh wrote: post #118
ootachi wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the responses from the other browser manufacturers were pretty convincing. The problem, if you read the thread, was not that NPAPI was sufficient. The problem was that Chrome wanted to reinvent all sorts of APIs that already existed in the Web platform. They ignored that issue and did Pepper anyway.

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 all the effort that could have gone to that went to this weird plugin- (and NaCl-)specific API instead.

It's kind of sad, because I would like to use these APIs in my web content, but I can't. The cynic in me would say that it's because Google wants to push NaCl. I don't want to program C++ to get access to these goodies; I want to program in CoffeeScript.

Re: Flash For Linux Will Only Be Available For Chrome

#126

Post by drivebyacct2 »

gexla wrote: post #17
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.

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...)

Re: Flash For Linux Will Only Be Available For Chrome

#127

Post by 9999 »

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 business reason for why the Player is not open source.

So here are my questions for Adobe:

Is there still income from Flash Player licensing? If not, how does keeping the Player closed source help your business interests?

Is it the client side DRM you have in place in the Player that's stopping you from making it open source?

Do you not have the resources to communicate with the community that would develop around an open sourced player (knowing that you would have spend some time to justify many things that exist in the codebase to maintain backwards compatibility)?

Are you concerned that a rival would clone some of the technology you developed and implement it in their proprietary player (e.g. MS, but they already gave up on Silverlight)?

Would the sudden influx of new security patches as vulnerabilities are discovered and fixed potentially compromise the performance of the Player?

Are you worried that individuals with malicious intent will find new vulnerabilities and exploit them?

What are your other concerns that are preventing you from open sourcing the Flash Player?

Re: Flash For Linux Will Only Be Available For Chrome

#128

Post by ugh »

Ralith wrote: post #116
chimeracoder wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't Google actually allow you to watch Youtube videos with HTML5 instead of flash?

Not the ones with ads.

I can watch every single YouTube video. I recently did a fresh install of OS X and have not yet bothered to install Flash (it's no longer installed by default). Every single YouTube video I want to play I can play. Those that used to have ads no longer have them.

The only YouTube videos I occasionally can't watch are the embedded ones. Clicking through to the YouTube page, however, solves that problem.

Re: Flash For Linux Will Only Be Available For Chrome

#129

Post by justinschuh »

0x0 wrote: post #121
justinschuh wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>From the press release it seems NPAPI is OS dependent while Pepper is less so. Correct. The NPAPI version of Flash is very platform-dependent; whereas Pepper Flash is almost completely platform neutral, and Chrome OS needs most of the same Pepper platform bits anyway. So, our maintenance overhead for Pepper Flash on Linux is very small. On top of that, Linux is broadly deployed throughout Google (and is very popular…

Flash provides a lot of hardware abstractions, from H.264 accelerated video, to webcam and microphone access, and accelerated 3d (openGL) rendering. Does the Pepper API provide wrappers for all this stuff? Otherwise it would seem that Flash for Linux would still need to carry a lot of platform-dependent plumbing.

Yes, the sandbox disallows direct hardware access. So, the PPAPI provides abstractions to those underlying capabilities.

Re: Flash For Linux Will Only Be Available For Chrome

#130

Post by guard-of-terra »

stanleydrew wrote: post #97
aninteger wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run ArchLinux, use Chrome, and have the flashplugin-prelease installed. This is version 10.0 of Flash. Because this plugin is out of date Chrome will disable flash on all websites I visited that use Flash. It would then show a little bar at the top indicating that my flash plugin is out of date and therefore disabled. If I wanted to run Flash anyway it gave me the option to run it for the current page. I noticed th…

There's no reason to run an out of date flash plugin. You can enable click-to-play for flash in the chrome settings. It's in the content settings area of the "under the hood" section I believe.

Click-to-play isn't friendly to music streaming services which use 1px flash player for their music.

Flashblock plugins are ridiculous by requiring you to blacklist or whitelist flash domain instead of web domain. The former happens to be on CDN and suddently you can't do it :(

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