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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?"
Today is the last day for the Macromedia Max conference. I had some coworkers attend the conference. Before they left, I asked them to ask the developers directly what the deal is. Hopefully some good will come out of it.
Homestarrunner aside, does anyone here actually go to flash sites? (especially when presented with a non-flash alternative upon entering the site?)
I have never found flash enabled sites to be any easier to navigate or more informative, usually the opposite.
Finkployd
of porting to 64-bit
My bet is it would take little more then a recompile. If anything, a new branch of support is the real issue.
Writing good code is hard and expensive.
This is the same difficulty that's kept Mozilla bug 156493, "Browser should tolerate plug-in (plugin) malfunctions, like with a separate (own) process", unfixed for the past three years. I'm reminded of this in particular, because starting plugins as separate processes (which was requested to prevent buggy plugins from crashing the entire Firefox/Mozilla process) would simultaneously have made it much easier for 64-bit browsers to support 32-bit plugins.
So it is true that Macromedia is lagging behind the leading edge of technology... but do you have to sound so self-righteous about it? If our browsers used interprocess communication instead of cooperative multitasking (a concept far more outdated than 32 bit binaries) then this wouldn't be a practical problem.
It's difficult to be sad when the prime competitor is Microsoft (the other is SVG), but if they went to the trouble of nailing down all of the corners, they would be protecting Flash's crown as most ubiquitous web animated gaudiness language.
Somewhere along the line, they seem to have lost the plot to that particular story, else a Linux port of Shockwave would have been here two years ago.
Locking competitors out is important because it sells Macromedia's expensive (AUD$760+GST for Dreamweaver 2004) development tools and entrained related products. A working GPLflash would be of enormous benefit to Macromedia. If they had any corporate sense, they'd do a deal with the author(s).
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I'm sitting in front of my 64 bit box right now running flash.
.txt file in the tarball (it involves copying some files into the plugins subdirectory) rather than doing the auto install (which will bomb).
1) Just go to getfirefox.org, run the automatic installation of that
2) Download the official macromedia flash tarball
3) Untar it and follow the manual install instructions in
4) Restart firefox.
Is tihs really that hard? Is there some mystical advantage to running 64 bit flash on my 64 opteron bit box when the 32 bit version works just fine?
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.