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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

#81

Post by aninteger »

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.

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 Because this plugin is out of date Chrome will disable flash on all websites I visited that use Flash. It would then show a little bar at the top indicating that my flash plugin is out of date and therefore disabled.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 that I rarely ever want to run flash unless i'm specifically visiting a youtube link. I really think this "Run Flash for current page" functionality should be the default though. I like having the option of turning on flash only when i absolutely want it. If I just keep running the older versions of Flash I can continue getting this desired functionality.

Re: Flash For Linux Will Only Be Available For Chrome

#82

Post by obtu »

coffeeaddicted wrote: post #78

The part I'm not yet getting about Pepper - does it only support those native client objects as described here? https://developers.google.com/native-client/overview Or do plugins like flash have the choice between native client and just using a shared library as they did and Pepper also supports that? In the first case it would basically mean that flash would run sandboxed (and maybe on every system supported by Pepp…

NaCL would probably have been mentioned if it was involved. I think Chrome can still do less fine-grained, OS-assisted sandboxing, and Flash on Pepper is cooperating with that.

Re: Flash For Linux Will Only Be Available For Chrome

#83

Post by ugh »

buster wrote: post #56
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…

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 true.

Conclusion: Flash is dead. We will have to deal with it for years but it's on its way out. A web technology that will not work on mobile devices has no future.

Re: Flash For Linux Will Only Be Available For Chrome

#84

Post by jaredsohn »

shimon_e wrote: post #74
gcp wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the except of Chrome due to a new API This is what's hard to understand: they are not dropping NPAPI on Windows, so it's not like the Chrome API is the enabler here.

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.

>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.

There will be updates and they will be desirable in Linux assuming people continue creating Flash content that makes use of the new features: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3621096.

Re: Flash For Linux Will Only Be Available For Chrome

#86

Post by pooriaazimi »

slowpoke wrote: post #23

Dear Adobe: just kill Flash already, for good. The world (wide web) will be a better place.

I'll rephrase that:

F* Adobe: just kill Flash already, for good. The world (wide web) will be a better place.

I feel absolutely no love for Adobe. Flash was a great technology and Macromedia was a dream company (at least for 14-year old me). They ruined Flash and other Macromedia inventions after taking over.

I truly wish Adobe dies alongside Flash. And Oracle also.

Re: Flash For Linux Will Only Be Available For Chrome

#87

Post by justinschuh »

ootachi wrote: post #14

For reference, here are the thoughts of Robert O'Callahan from Mozilla (and those of Simon Fraser from Apple) on Pepper: https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/plugin-futures/2010-April... The thread (which continues into May) goes over pretty clearly why they felt Pepper was a bad idea.

If you read the responses from Chrome engineers on that thread you'll see why a new API was necessary. The requirements and guarantees of your API fundamentally change when you move it out of process for sandboxing and stability. Naive approaches lead to awful performance, deadlocks, or the need to poke massive holes in your security architecture. After a few engineering years of trying to make NPAPI work, it became clear that the result was so different and banned so much of NPAPI that a clean break was the only correct approach.

Re: Flash For Linux Will Only Be Available For Chrome

#88

Post by dave_sullivan »

Btw, really? Downvote me but you've got nothing to say?

To weigh in on the pro flash side: say you're developing applications for large enterprises, many of which still run ie7 or 8 (mind you, not websites, but applications that run in a browser and are delivered over the Internet). Since HTML5 (by which, none of you actually mean html5 in that case, it's mostly some kind of JavaScript front end with frameworks far from mature (though I like both backbone and ember/sproutcore, they've got a ways to go before being comparable to flex w/ robot legs, and js will never be as3)) will not work well in this situation, what do you propose?

For Adobe's part, I wish they'd be a bit more transparent, but regardless, I think I'm good to go with a pretty wide and stable cross-browser feature set today and will be that way for a while while JS frameworks play catch up. And meanwhile, good luck getting an IT dept at a fortune 500 to upgrade all their browsers to the latest version of firefox or chrome and to make that a requirement to use your software. And what would you gain by doing that today exactly if that's your target market?

What can HTML5/JS do today for RIA's that flash can't do better, faster, and cheaper?

Re: Flash For Linux Will Only Be Available For Chrome

#89

Post by shimon_e »

jaredsohn wrote: post #84
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.

>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. There will be updates and they will be desirable in Linux assuming people continue creating Flash content that makes use of the new features: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3621096 .

Interesting. So there will be another 3 version with the following features:

Keyboard input support in full-screen mode

Improved audio support for working with low-latency audio

Ability to progressively stream textures for Stage 3D content

LZMA compression support for ByteArray

Frame label events

ActionScript workers (enables concurrent ActionScript execution on separate threads)

Support for advanced profiling

Support for more hardware-accelerated video cards (from 2005/2006) in order to expand availability of hardware accelerated content

Improved ActionScript performance when targeting Apple iOS (What the??? iOS???)

Performance index API to inform about performance capabilities of current environment

Release outside mouse event API

Refactoring and modernizing the current core Flash runtime code base

Work on the ActionScript Virtual Machine

Updates to the ActionScript language

--

Doesn't seem like there will be anything new that can not be currently albeit less efficiently.

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