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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.
I don't have flash installed, and you know what?
I've found browsing to be much more injoyable!
Flash: mostly crap.
--Phillip
Can you say BIRTH TAX
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
I just noticed that a few things have been committed to CVS in the past week. Yay!
And just when I think that I've done enough fact-checking...
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.
Flash player users pay $0 per copy to Macromedia. Last I checked, the Flash player is neither adware nor spyware-encumbered, so they aren't making any money there, either.
Flash player users on 64-bit platforms are a vanishingly small percentage of Flash player users.
If Flash is not 64-bit clean, then it will probably be reasonably expensive for Macromedia to clean it up.
What can Macromedia expect for a return on this investment? Well, zero times 0.005 is still zero.
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.
...is to keep up with the changes of architectures and OSes. I imagine moving flash player to x64 is tougher than moving it from Windows ME to Windows XP, since it contains multimedia codecs using at least some assembly language.
That oughtta force them to move the core of the player to opensource so people would do most of the porting jobs for new OSes, while they just build on that code to make it a 'professional' version for selling.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
I so need to upgrade!
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
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
Last time I checked, web browers were not even taking advantage of 32bit architecure. I don't see a lot of high performance 64 bit web browsers out there.
Anyways, the question is moot as there are few HOME desktop based 64bit only solutions out there, really. None actually. All have a 32bit support mode. Why cater to a small market of 64 bit only powerhouse enterprise servers, people using these systems are not interested in browsing websites, just serving them to millions.
If 64bit web servers were unable to serve Flash content, I am sure Macromedia would get on the ball, but I don't think the computer world is for lack of a 64 bit Flash plug-in to feed those power hunger high performance 64 bit web browsers nobody is using.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
"It's not all that hard to buy an AMD64 machine with Windows XP"
It's not all that hard to buy an AMD64 machine with Windows XP 32-bit Edition. This of course renders most 64-bit goodness moot. I have yet to see a machine in any of the major high street and online shops (read: where most people still get their PC's from) that ships with XP x64, I guess because it's only available in it's 'Professional' flavour - not the shockingly different 'Home' flavour.
Windows XP Professional x64 Edition.
Don't expect the majority of people to be properly 64-bit enabled until Longhorn and a bit (for OS turnover in the consumer world). One of the umpteen LH flavours is sure to support your nice juicy new processor.
One question, are "modern Pentium 4 chips", "64-bit capable"? And to what extent? I wasn't aware any of the P4's were in anyway 64-bit (atleast no corny dun-dun-dun-dun adverts on TV bragging about 'Intel 64-bit technology' yet)
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, when I try to visit homestar runner on my 64-bit PowerMac G5, I... oh, wait--it works.
That's probably because OSX is still almost entirely 32bit.
I'm sure that once Apple catch up you'll experience the same issue.
Debian is 64-bit only. If you want to run 32-bit applications, you have to do so under a chroot. This keeps it pure in two ways: every userland program is 64-bit, and there's a reasonable chance that every userland program is Open Source.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
There's no difficulty, read my lips: They Don't Care. You have 1991 signatures, thats less than the enrollment at some high schools. If there was a business case, i.e. if they actually made money on it, then Macromedia would do something. To appease 1991 geeks running a fringe OS on (admit it) fringe hardware? C'mon...
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I know this is hard for some of you to understand, but everything from PetitionOnline falls on deaf ears. No one cares about internet petitions, it takes almost no effort to fill out an internet petition. If you want someone to take you seriously, send a fax and follow up with a certified snailmail.
Certainly a deal clencher for me, buy an AMD64 and get no more Flash popups and intro pages!
Makes FlashBlock a little redundant now though....
#include <sig.h>