Why Won't Macromedia Release 64-bit Flash?

Flashless Dancer asks: "Despite numerous online campaigns, blogs and forum postings, Macromedia has failed to release a 64 bit version of it's popular Flash Player for 64 bit architectures. Growing outcry in the Linux community recently spawned the online petition at PetitionOnline, but this seems to have fallen on deaf ears. A recent posting to Macromedia's technotes, back in September, offers this explanation and advice to users and developers who are growing increasingly concerned that users with 64 bit architectures are unable to view online content created with Flash. It explains that users must downgrade to 32 bit browsers and use the 32 bit plugin. This simply isn't a good option for most users, in fact many Linux distributions, including FC2/3/4 install 64-bit browsers with their 64-bit distributions. This seems to breathe new life into the old GplFlash Project which is now back, after some time on the back burner. Future development of GplFlash2 promises support for Flash 6/7 but remains in development for now. Open speculation in chatrooms and web forums alleges all sorts of conspiracy theories but, what I'd like to know is: What's the real difficulty here for Macromedia?"

Comments

Re:They're hiring

[imr]

Porting the Flash Player to 'alternative' platforms
and it pretty much explains that there won't be a 64 bits version as long as they don't find a guru that will rewrite this beast. Not portable.

Re:But 32 bit flash works on my 64 bit box

[floamy]

That only works because your distribution installed 32bit libraries and is using emulation. If your distribution was 64bit, or you didn't want to use a different set of libraries for Mozilla, you wouldn't be able to run Flash.