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Why Is Adobe Flash On Linux Still Broken?
mwilliamson writes "As I sit reading my morning paper online I still cannot view the embedded videos due to auto-detection of my Flash player not working. One in every three or four YouTube videos crashes the browser. I remember sometime back reading that Adobe has a very small development team (possibly only one) working on the Linux port of Flash. It has occurred to me that Flash on Linux is the one major entry barrier controlling acceptance of Linux as a viable desktop operating system. No matter how stably, smoothly, efficiently, and correctly Linux runs on a machine, the public will continue to view it as second-rate if Flash keeps crashing. This is the worst example of being tied down and bound by a crappy 3rd-party product over which no Linux distribution has any control. GNASH is nice, but it just isn't there 100%. I really do have to suspect Adobe's motivation for keeping Flash on Linux in such a deplorable state."
Are you still on Firefox 2? I had those problems but they went away with the upgrade to Firefox 3 (I'm on Ubuntu).
There is Gnash (http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/) but it still has a way to go
I've noticed, at least since I switched from Firefox 2 to Firefox 3, that when Adobe Flash Player 9 ( or 10 ) is installed the browser exhibits sporadic lockups and crashes when navigating the Web -- not just when viewing Flash video or a site that makes heavy use of Flash, although that does seem to increase the odds of the browser eating itself.
After the release of Firefox 3.0 I opted to install Adobe Flash Player 10 Beta. The performance was much better as was the video quality and I didn't experience as many crashes. This all changed when Adobe updated the Beta and the details can be found in the bug report that I filed here. To summarize, after the update, Flash Player 10 would cause the browser to segfault and lockup so frequently, sometimes even upon startup, that the browser became unusable -- I had to downgrade to Flash Player 9. Currently there is someone from Adobe assigned to work on the "problem" whatever it is, but I haven't heard anything in weeks.
jdb2
I experienced frequent Firefox crashes due to Flash in my Ubuntu box, which went being upgraded from 6.06 to 7.04 to 7.10 to 8.04. But then my hard disk crashed and I had to reinstall Ubuntu 8.04 from scratch. It's been now three months of this fresh installation, and in this period Flash has never, ever, crashed my Firefox. It's been rock solid.
My wild guess then would be that your setup is half-broken much like mine was. Try that old Windows trick of wiping your hard disk and reinstalling your Linux distribution, whatever it is. It might be the solution.
Now, this doesn't mean Flash in Linux isn't still full of bugs. It not respecting transparencies and correct depth levels in pages is a major annoyance. But at least crashing isn't part of the list anymore, at least for me.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
So there is no version of Flash that is open source then?
The disadvantage of not being able to play Flash is mostly on sites like YouTube. But some other sites are also using Flash for the interesting content.
So the big question is - is it possible to implement a Flash player for Linux that's open source?
I was going to mod you down for not RTFS [especially the part about GNASH], but instead I'll answer your question.
Yes, it's called Gnash.The Wikipedia page should tell you all you need to know.
I suggest the read of penguin.swf blogosplat which is Adobe's blog for posting new version of flash for linux (such as the recent Flash 10 beta or the new alpha)
It seems that you don't know what GNASH is!
If I am right, GNASH is a GNU Flash player under GPL, whose base is gameswf, which was originally created for the interface of a game on XBOX.
I mainly know gameswf for having worked with it, it is nice and very promising, but lacked some important functions and need (in my opinion) a code redesign.
You'll have Pulseaudio tell you different, but if you use a pure Alsa for your sound, you'll find Flash--and everything else that uses sound--runs MUCH better.
I have no idea why Pulseaudio has been thrust into various distributions, it's cumbersome at best, outright broken at worst. There's nothing Pulseaudio brings to the table that's needed. Application volume sliders? Anything that outputs volume already has a volume slider, why do I need another one? Sound over the network? Is this REALLY a feature people want at the expense of a huge majority of programs not working? And what's wrong with ESD for this?
So do yourself a favor, and remove all the Pulseaudio stuff from your distro.
There are already at least two applications that do this: swfdec and gnash.
http://swfdec.freedesktop.org/wiki/
http://www.gnashdev.org/
As others have stated, there's Gnash. However, there's also Swfdec.
http://swfdec.freedesktop.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swfdec
There is two versions of Flash decoding libraries, one called Gnash and another called Swfdec. I still wonder why they don't work together, but hey, they are open source and both has kinda different visions how to deal with Flash proprietary stuff. I have tested Swfdec for a while and I can say that Ads surerly works, so do YouTube videos - but not perfectly. I personally think one of them will achieve 90% of all Flash stuff playable in next year or two, so it is kinda very ok. To be honest, Adobe also opened up Flash spec a bit more and as far as I heard both teams are busy implementing stuff from it.
So, in short, it is possible, but it takes time. As it is not pressing problem - there is Adobe Flash player for Linux officialy - so everything progress slowly. But it goes forward.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
You can extract Flash Video URLs from YouTube pages and play them with MPlayer, VLC, Totem etc. There are even Greasemonkey scripts replacing the Flash applet with a video that plugins like totem-mozilla can play. Google it :).
I for one refuse to use the proprietary Flash Plugin and I do not think we can rely on proprietary plugins in the long run.
See, thats marked as troll, and the poster probably was trolling. However, is there a real difference between flash and silverlight? They're both controlled by a single company. If Moonlight (the linux based open source version based on mono) takes off, shouldn't that put more pressure on Adobe to fix their crappy linux port?
Of course, I'd take silverlight more seriously if it worked better on Windows. Several computers I've set up have had problems installing Silverlight.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
My bad - sort of.
I'm using 32-bit Firefox 2.0.0.16 on 64-bit openSUSE 10.2. (I get tired of waiting for them to upgrade, and I can't get it to compile, so I just grab the 32-bit binary from mozilla.com and plop it in my ~/bin.)
BTW, the Flash 10 installer wouldn't run ("OS not supported"), but copying libflashplayer.so to ~/.mozilla/plugins and restarting the browser did the trick.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
One in every three or four YouTube videos crashes the browser.
Of course the ideal solution would be for Adobe to fix Flash, but in the meantime you can use nspluginwrapper to prevent Firefox from crashing whenever Flash goes down. nspluginwrapper runs Flash in a separate child process from the web browser, and uses IPC to display the plugin's contents in your browser; it was originally created to allow people to use 32-bit plugins in 64-bit browsers, but this mechanism is also great for isolating the web browser from plugin crashes.
Another solution is to use Opera, which on Linux runs its plugins in an nspluginwrapper-like child process by default.
Yep to everything anagama said. It's likely that the restaurant owner has no idea how the web developer created or implemented the site (nor does he particularly care). All he knows is that it worked when the guy showed it to him before handing over the check and that it works on his own computer when he tries it. He has no idea that there are whole groups of people that are completely blocked off from accessing his site. He needs to be made aware of this. Whether he does anything or not is another matter entirely (he probably paid more than he wanted to for the Flash site and is wary of having it redesigned so soon).
This guy's the limit!
THere is no Flash implementation in the webbrowser. However, there is a built-in app that reads the videos directly from YouTube, which is very nice. Unfortunately, it also means other flash-based video sites (e.g. Hulu) are unavailable.
I've never been able to make any Flash site at all work with gnash (I'm currently using gnash 0.8.2).
I too am using 64 bit Linux and and just recently gnash has come on by leaps and bounds. I'm currently running 0.8.3 and suddenly quite a lot of things (including youtube) work.
I'm puzzled by the original article though. I've always found Adobe flash on 32-bit Linux to work without problem. The real issue seems to me to be their failure to produce a 64-bit version of flash for *any* platform - Linux or Windows. With the steady shift to 64-bit computing, they're going to find themselves frozen out soon if they aren't careful.
I tried a couple of the betas of 10. Where flash 9 just locks up and/or crashes the browser occasionally, these versions of flash 10 crashed it every single time the plugin tried to load.
Until they have "released" something (I use the word release only because they do, you and I both know it isn't going to be production-quality, just like every version before it) I'm staying well away.
Swfdec is written in C, and Gnash in C++.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
None of the open-source implementations, last I checked, would run YouTube, or any embedded video.
Huh? Gnash runs YouTube just fine. So does Swfdec. Are you on an unsupported platform?
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Worse: we have to reverse-engineer the undocumented parts, e.g. RTMP.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
i.e, remove libflashsupport, use the latest flash 10 beta and create a /etc/asound.conf as described in bug 198453
I've not had any browser crashes since doing this, so cross fingers. This is probably a very common problem..
http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=5587712&postcount=472. This guy has for a long time been working on getting flash working perfectly in ubuntu 8.04 and following the linked guide makes it work perfectly for me.
If youtube didn't use flash for video, what would they use instead? Animated gifs?
Or maybe embedded video, which browsers have supported for decades? Like, oh, Quicktime, or mpeg?
You could argue that Flash had a wider install base. And you'd be right -- but what about up-to-date Flash? YouTube has been requiring higher and higher versions, like just about all Flash content. At this point, I would guess that everyone who can watch YouTube also has some sort of player that supports mpeg.
We really need at least some form of video integrated into the browser, and it looks like we might have it in firefox soon
You're talking about the HTML5 video tag. Erm... Safari beat us to it. With h.264 support.
So, Safari and Firefox will support native video. It should be trivial to write a script which detects a browser not supporting the video tag, and replaces it with some embedded Flash, for backwards compatibility -- and because we know it will take a decade or so for IE to support this.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
There is two versions of Flash decoding libraries, one called Gnash and another called Swfdec. I still wonder why they don't work together, but hey, they are open source and both has kinda different visions how to deal with Flash proprietary stuff.
From http://www.gnashdev.org/?q=node/30 is a sorta answer:
LWN: Some LWN readers have complained that having two projects aimed at implementing Flash is divisive and wasteful. How would you respond to those readers?
Benjamin: The optimal number of projects for a given project space sounds like a good PhD thesis topic. Having multiple projects in a space, or multiple solutions to a problem is simply how things work in the community. Any non-trivial bug or project space has multiple solutions, and often one cannot determine which is the best solution until all have been tried. Also, people working on these projects are real people with real interests and complex motivations for working on particular projects. Simplifying it into "you currently work on A, so you'd instead like working on B in the same project space" is unrealistic. And IMO, divisiveness between similar projects often has more to do with fanboys than it has to do with developers, who obviously share interests and experiences.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
Not just that - Flash is also great for minigames, original animation, small applications... The only thing flash should NOT be used for is making websites, wholly or in part. Unfortunately, lots of bad webmasters just don't get it.
Of course, maybe if Javascript behavior was more consistent across different browsers, versions of the same browser and operating systems, people would stop making crappy flash websites.
What video codec problem? VLC plays everything.
Games, that's another story. Some work in WINE, but a lot don't. So Windows still has its place on the home desktop.
speaking of that, video codecs are a WAY bigger problem than flash. Anyone can live without flash. I'd put codecs and games way before flash any way. And if Red Alert 2/Oblivion/Generals/Starcraft can't run on Linux, I'm installing Windows.
I guess it's a good thing they all run in Wine then. I was just playing Starcraft less than an hour ago, actually.
As for video codecs, I've never run into a video I couldn't play before.
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I used to use Fedora 9 with Flash 9 and it crashed all the time. I tried several fixes including the beta 10 Flash plugin but Firefox crashes about 50% playing youtube video. Interestingly, I have another box with Ubuntu 8.04 and Flash plays perfectly on it with video. I did some research on Flash and Pulseaudio and saw that Ubuntu was directing sound from the Flash plugin to Alsa instead of pulseaudio server. There are different configurations which make the Flash plugin more stable. Disabling pulseaudio and routing audio through Alsa should improve the Flash plugin stability.
Flash doesn't crash so often with a good audio driver. The main problem is the new PulseAudio and no update from adobe. With alsa it works like a charm.
First off, I think Slashcode ate some tags in your post.
On topic: for YouTube and other embedded video, one can try one of the few bazillion "play this video using embedded MPlayer/Media Player/QuickTime/VLC/whatever" Greasemonkey scripts over on userscripts.org. That is, if you use a Mozilla-based browser.
The Hacker's Guide To The Kernel: Don't panic()!
Oh and don't forget to AdBlock the original video with a suitable pattern, as otherwise Flash and your favorite player will fight a duel to the death over which one is going to play the video, the loser (Flash) often taking the browser down with it.
The Hacker's Guide To The Kernel: Don't panic()!
MPEG has the patent problem: Getting a commercially supported player, for Linux, remains impossible becuase the patent owners _will not sell_ reasonable licenses for Linux. While sites like 'Penguin Liberation Front' remain very useful for those of us who need casual tool access to play an occasional MPEG, making commercially supportable MPEG players for Linux remains awkward.
Mind you, the 'Penguin Liberation Front' remains a wonderful source of software for anyone outside of the DMCA encumbered and software patent encumbered USA who wnats to play MPEG's, DVD's, or even have access to wired old tools that had odd licenses.
I'm running Opera on the AMD64 port of Debian unstable and Flash works great for me. If you're having a problem, you're doing it wrong.
Maybe not
Why am I not surprised that the industry at large isn't embracing another me-too Microsoft knock-off product? To this day I can't name 2 websites that use Silverlight, and one of them is Microsoft themselves.
Xune, Vista, Silverlight. Oh Microsoft, can you please look up "innovation" in the dictionary?
I could flame you for suggesting to replace a 5-year old proprietary format with a 10-year old proprietary format
QuickTime follows a published international standard. If your concern is patents, what non-proprietary format were you thinking of? Ogg Theora?
Nearly all the advances that have happened on the internet over the last 15 years have been started as proprietary technology, while the technologies that began life open have wallowed and gone virtually nowhere. It's only when the proprietary technologies become open that things become better.
Yeah, that email thing was a real flop. Nobody uses that. SSH? What's that? When ever will BitTorrent actually get used? HTML? Who uses that when they can use Flash?
Of course, qualifying it with in the last 15 years cuts out the biggies, the internet itself! Fully documented standards without which we'd still be modeming to BBSes or Compu$erve.
Many of the truly successful innovations on the net, including the net itself, are the result of fully open specs designed to permit easy re-implementation and even better, reference code or full apps ready to use.
I'm not trying to hide my bias - most of the work we do is in Actionscript.
But I agree as much as the next guy that making a typical website in Flash is stupid. So is unnecessary required video, low-contrast color schemes, gratuitous music, required Javascript for basic navigation, poor text-only / accessibility support, and many other things that are common on all together too many sites.
There's a bunch of reasons to use Flash, but the biggest one is that it lets you do something no other platform does - create rich, full featured, object oriented applications that just work with a wide installed user base, on a variety of platforms, with a minimum* of security risk to the user.
If you're only thinking Flash Video, you're thinking too small. Think "any application in the world that does not need direct hardware access or to maximize its access to computing resources" It runs over the web, it runs locally, and it runs the same.
Really, Flash shouldn't have this crown. Java applets should. But they don't, because of how that played out in the 90s. The behavior isn't consistent, and developing rich applications for it was tedious at best.
For the programmers reading, you don't want to develop apps in Flash, which is a super-glorified animation tool. But you want to develop in Adobe Flex, which is a wonderful tool with a for-pay IDE, but a free CLI compiler. The OUTPUT is a Flash swf, but the INPUT no longer has a binary animation file, and all of the layout supports inheritance. And the crossover is tremendous and seamless, so you can use whatever your animators/designers make in Flash in a blink.
To address some other points:
Even requiring a recent version of Flash, Flash does generally have a higher installed user base than any other single system. Obviously "HTML" per se has a higher base, but if you're doing anything modestly complex you have to break apart the major-different IE versions from everything else, and last I checked I believe Flash 9 has a higher installed base than any family of HTML rendering. I believe these stats were based on computers "active on the web" - so it doesn't count things that aren't hooked up to the internet currently, many of which presumably have old versions of IE.
Flash Player isn't as open and crossplatform as I'd like, but in general it's been getting better on both counts. Reading the comments of people who actually described there system, it seems like there's problems running Flash Player with 64bit browsers in Linux, and not with 32bit browsers...
*I didn't say NO security risk. But as platforms for running totally arbitrary third party code go, I don't know of anything that does a BETTER job.
Starting as early as 2002 Actionscript is an OOP language.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
This blog http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/ is written by one of the people working on the linux version of Flash and explains some stuff about working on Flash (somewhere in the archives is an explanation of why there is no 64 bit native Flash player yet IIRC)
From the HOWTO on the 1.0 version from the "C&C: generals" page you linked to:
4. Once the installation is done, find yourself a no-cd crack and replace the original game.dat and generals.exe with the cracked ones.
I don't consider a requirement of installing a no-cd crack as being good enough to say that a game runs in Wine (see this: "... some would advocate the use of illegally modified or "cracked" games, Wine does not support, advocate, or even view this as a solution").
However, it seems reasonable to consider the other games to be working under Wine — I haven't run Oblivion myself, but RA2 and Starcraft run fine (although I do occasionally have issues with RA2 on a slow computer).
Ask me about repetitive DNA
how does the iphone use youtube if it doesn't use flash?
YouTube only uses Flash as a client to serve their videos. The videos themselves are streamed separately from the Flash client. In other words, you could pretty much make a "YouTube client" out of anything. Apple just happens to have their own YouTube client that is probably (at least partially) written in Objective-C and using QuickTime.
This author takes full ownership and responsibility for the unpopular opinions outlined above.
Flash excels at vector graphics. If you have animated or computer generated graphics as opposed to raw video than the files are incredibly compact.
Unless you're dealing strictly with raytracing those generated graphics are rasterized and not vectors.
Flash was the PowerPoint of the Web and suddenly Macromedia and Adobe decided, for everyone [by their merger], that we really want to live in a powerpoint presentation.
There is no reason to fault them for trying this business approach and it's up to the general consumers to show them differently by supporting alternative equivalents as they surface.
i am using ubuntu 8.04 and i do not use pulse audio so this fix worked for me. I used to have firefox crash every other video or so on you tube, and forget any site that used flash exclusively for content. synaptic search for "libflashsupport" remove it and enjoy using flash again.
how does the iphone use youtube if it doesn't use flash?
Apple convinced YouTube to switch formats, since H.264 is superior at compression and quality, YouTube agreed. Apple (I heard) is helping YouTube convert all their old stock to H.264. All that newer higher quality stuff is H.264, but in browsers the player is still flash.
Once YouTube abandons Flash for content, the question remains why (should YouTube) use it for anything? The open source players are phenomenal, and YouTube being a Google joint now, I half expect them to switch their required (or recommended) plugin to mplayer or vlc.
The Admin and the Engineer
Don't get me started on Java. Especially on 64-bit platforms, especially 64-bit Linux platforms. If you thought Flash worked badly on 64-bit Linux, you've never even attempted Java on the same. It's easier to get Flash working on Firefox 3 on 64-bit Linux than it is for Java. In the end, if I ever decide I need Java (Which I do not.) I can just install a 32-bit browser, then it works with a little less cajoling.
I am beginning to think that maybe Darl McBride was attacked viciously by a penguin as a child.
So far nothing MS has done is anywhere close to that. They covered two major browsers on Windows in 1.0 and are planning to cover the third one in the 2.0 release, they've released an OS X version, and they provide official support (in terms of developer documentation and conformance test suites) and supply codecs to a generic Unix/X11 implementation. You may argue that it's all just deceit, similar to how other posters in the thread above have done, and that can be discussed - but to say that MS does nothing to support Silverlight on multiple platforms is simply incorrect.
As the inventor of live video on the web I think I know what I'm talking about, and it used no plug ins (just multipart/replace encoding). Later versions used javascript to achieve the same effect, still no plug ins needed. Audio was initially done using a small java applet.
XMLHttpRequest is used for 'under water' connections to the server to update a page that is already there, try switching off javascript for a while and see how many websites will break, the majority of them (including the one we are writing all this on) will have a non-js fallback. So, that's definitely not what 'drove the popularity of the internet'. That's just FUD.
TCP/IP, HTTP, XML and to a lesser extent older content protocols such as NNTP, gopher, archie, ftp and telnet are what made the internet as large as it is.
Only when there was sufficient critical mass did we get these 'proprietary protocols' and file formats with all the associated trouble. Read back for a bit in the RFC archive to see just how wrong you really are.
XMLHttpRequest is a classic example of Microsofts embrace and extend strategy, and it is to this day carrying the baggage of that.
MP3 Search Engine
Many others are experiencing issues. This is one of many threads like this on the Ubuntu forums where people are having serious issue with flash (especially compared to earlier versions (before 9.048). Version 9.112 and beyond (and even Beta) still are really slow, consume a crapload of cpu cycles and are in general unusable.
I've been researching this issue (mainly to get Hulu.com videos playable in fullscreen on a Mythbuntu setup) and have found no recourse other than playing the video at normal size, but using Firefox's zoom or turning on Compiz and using the fullscreen zoom to enlarge the video. Even so the video gets choppy occasionally and of course, is kind of a pain.
Right now full screen videos (using Flash's full screen option) use 90% CPU (out of 2 CPUs on an Athlon 64x2 4800+) and beat to death the poor Sempron 2800 I have on my Mythbuntu setup. Funny enough, the puny Sempron can play HD videos at 1080p with little or no issue.
After following countless threads (and the official bug report on Adobe's website), trying every 9 version and 10 beta, and so on I've pretty much given up on getting Flash to behave for now. Don't get me wrong, I believe you when you say it's playing fine for you, but either the issue is genuinely not affecting your system, or you haven't paid attention to cpu usage while playing flash. As always YMMV.
BTW, any hints not covered in the forums greatly appreciated. Getting fullscreen flash working is the last step in getting a web video based MythTV setup working.
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Oddly, though, I've not had any problem running Flash on my laptop. Well... depending on browser. It's between your two computers in terms of power... a Core 2 Duo T5450 1.66GHz w/ 2GB of RAM.
I'm using Zenwalk 5.2 as my base system, updated to current. I've got Firefox 2, and I'm using Flash from the packages. Youtube videos play fine, little flash games like Desktop Tower Defense, and others on Facebook (well, one of the Mindjolt games on FB doesn't work, but that just doesn't load at all, and has the same behaviour under FF3 on Windows XP... oddly, it *does* load on Konqueror), as well as sites like gamedesign.co.jp. They all work. No crash. No slowdowns. No obscenely high CPU usage. It's working as intended.
Oddly... the inbox on Facebook doesn't work properly under Firefox. Again, same behaviour under FF3 on Windows XP (my work computer). At work, I use Internet Exploder to access that. At home, I installed Konqueror (Which FB thinks is Safari 2 and suggests I should consider upgrading, but the inbox does work). There is a package for Flash for Konqueror under Zenwalk, but I instead allowed it to detect and use the Firefox plugin. On that browser, I see the problems you're describing... games crash the browser about half the time, CPU usage is far higher than it should be. Because it's working fine under Firefox, though, I haven't really felt any need to upgrade.
YMMV... but maybe it's got more to do with your distro than it does Linux as a whole.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
but there are plenty of ways to present video via JavaScript without using a plugin monster like Flash or Silverlight. That's what Apple does
No. Apple uses Quicktime, which is a plug-in. Are you being purposefully dense?
It's pretty monstrous, too. Flash is, what, 1.4 MB download? Silverlight is like 4.5 MB or so... the old 1.0 version less. Quicktime is somewhere around 23 MB.
Using the presentation of web video as a killer app for browser middleware is absurdly ridiculous.
Ok; so how do you do it without using "browser middleware?" The only browser with any form of video support at the moment is Safari, since they're already starting to implement HTML5. Hey, maybe HTML5 will be super successful and using plug-ins like Quicktime and Flash to present video will be seen as quaint. But that doesn't change the fact that, right now for the majority of users, a browser plug-in is the only way to view video on the web.
So let's take the third application of Flash/Silverlight beyond animated ads and framing video: rich apps. Apple is also proving that this can be done just as well using a JavaScript framework with MobileMe. Yes, Apple had problems getting their servers up to serve the few million upgrading .Mac users and an an influx of new iPhone MM subscribers, but the apps work pretty well, and they outclass anything I've seen built in Flash/Flex/AIR.
I can't drag a file from my desktop and drop it on a Javascript application. I can't have a Javascript application ask me where to save a file to my computer, then save it. There's no such thing as a Javascript runtime (although I hear Mozilla is working on one) so that I can use the JS app like a local application, without requiring a browser.
There are tons of things Flash/Flex/AIR can do that Javascript can't. Remember the concepts there were cribbed from Shockwave, and Shockwave has a track record of making functional cross-platform applications that don't require a browser.
You don't even have to like Apple's hardware to appreciate what its doing for open source.
I don't really give a crap about what license a particular piece of code is under. I do, however, care that you're so busy giving your Steve Jobs collector's doll a blowjob to realize that Quicktime is actually a browser plugin... seriously, man, get a grip.
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Erm, Silverlight 2 is already out in beta, with new controls released under a public license. The Moonlight 2 team has alpha builds already. :)