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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

#131

Post by beggi »

windsurfer wrote: post #123
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 li…

Exactly! Does anyone remember this: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/html5/articles/css-shaders.html

Re: Flash For Linux Will Only Be Available For Chrome

#132

Post by radarsat1 »

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…

To responders: yes, I agree that DRM and patents are a big problem for this. I don't have an answer to that..

Re: Flash For Linux Will Only Be Available For Chrome

#133

Post by cookiecaper »

yardie wrote: post #41
kiloaper wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm not finding any great hardship these days. You must not watch many videos in your browsers then outside the odd one on Youtube. The reality out there is that Flash is still the main choice for delivering video. Flash is a necessary evil. It may be dying but for many it's still necessary and its removal from Firefox removes significant usability for its users.

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).

Re: Flash For Linux Will Only Be Available For Chrome

#134

Post by cookiecaper »

ConceptJunkie wrote: post #45
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 don't find Flash crashing my browser on Linux too often, but it crashes itself pretty regularly. Plus the older hardware I run Linux on can barely show a 288p Hulu video, with lots of stuttering, even though the machine can play videos twice that resolution flawlessly in any of the native video players.

>I don't find Flash crashing my browser on Linux too often, but it crashes itself pretty regularly.

Before recentish versions of Firefox, a Flash crash would bring down the whole browser.

Re: Flash For Linux Will Only Be Available For Chrome

#135

Post by buster »

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…

I may agree, but you didn't show where _Adobe_ states this for the _desktop_ ...

If you were on Wikipedia you'd see a [Citation needed] here.

Re: Flash For Linux Will Only Be Available For Chrome

#136

Post by drivebyacct2 »

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…

What are you talking about? Are you suggesting that Adobe provide an implement Flash via Web APIs and Javascript? We're talking about the challenges of having a plugin interface for Chrome and how NPAPI is limited/flawed and you're suggesting... Web APIs?

Maybe I'm really confused because I don't understand.

Re: Flash For Linux Will Only Be Available For Chrome

#137

Post by rmc »

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.

Re: Flash For Linux Will Only Be Available For Chrome

#138

Post by ootachi »

drivebyacct2 wrote: post #136
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…

What are you talking about? Are you suggesting that Adobe provide an implement Flash via Web APIs and Javascript? We're talking about the challenges of having a plugin interface for Chrome and how NPAPI is limited/flawed and you're suggesting... Web APIs? Maybe I'm really confused because I don't understand.

The proposal that roc and smfr put forth is this: Native code could call Web APIs, slightly tweaked for the benefit of native code and to satisfy the security/isolation guarantees that Chrome wants to enforce. These same APIs would have JavaScript versions, so that ordinary Web content could use them as well. For example, the same asynchronous 3D command stream API that Pepper exposes would be available to Web Workers.

Here's some further reading:

* https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/plugin-futures/2010-May/0...

* https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/plugin-futures/2010-May/0...

Note that Darin's followup message included this:

"I do agree however we want to keep Pepper APIs in sync with existing Web APIs. That will obviously be a challenge if they are not one and the same, but I don't think it is impossible or even that difficult to achieve with them being separate APIs."

This has already failed. Web Workers cannot render even 2D content asynchronously today, while Pepper can (which advantages plugins and NaCl over ordinary Web content). This is exactly the problem that roc and smfr were trying to avoid.

I don't think that Darin's example, of an tag being untouchable by Web content, is an insurmountable problem. In fact, I think this is exactly the kind of thing you want JavaScript content to be able to do -- high-fidelity JS versions of PDF and Flash would be great. And the issue of Web Workers and audio APIs needing shared memory is a Chrome problem (because Chrome puts each worker in a separate process), but not a problem for browsers generally.

Also, the argument that "it's an existing plugin, you don't want them to rewrite their code" doesn't hold water. It's an entirely new set of plugin APIs. Adobe has to rewrite its code anyway. It's just that the other browser vendors wanted the Web as a whole to benefit from this, not just Adobe.

Re: Flash For Linux Will Only Be Available For Chrome

#139

Post by zobzu »

Estragon wrote: post #94
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…

> 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 web, due to the above, and that it can do stuff such as "take your C/C#/etc. app and run in it Chrome, via Chrome market!", while they know others can hardly ever implement it.

you can be relatively sure that Google pushed Adobe a little bit in that direction, and that eventually flash may be Pepper API only. Its easier for Adobe too.

Re: Flash For Linux Will Only Be Available For Chrome

#140

Post by drivebyacct2 »

I'm surprised that everyone seem to think that this is some sort of exclusive Chrome thing. I'm willing to bet that this is more from Adobe's inability to understand how to do auto-updates correctly and the fact that Chrome is the only browser to support Pepper.

Adobe gets free auto-updates and there is no hassle or extra steps for users, since there is only one way for them to effectively use it. I'm sure if Firefox were to support Pepper that they would make it available in a PPA or something.

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