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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."
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?
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
I used to have this happen to be on Ubuntu 8.04. I fixed it by downloading the official version of Flash from the Adobe website and replacing all of the versions of the .so on my computer. Wouldn't you know it, it worked again. I think the problem is that the version in Ubuntu 8.04 was hacked up to support PulseAudio. When I removed PulseAudio, suddenly audio didn't work anymore (in addition to, you know, the crashing all the time), but when I replaced the .so, it did again. So I recommend going to the Adobe website and getting the official version, because it does work.
They just don't care because there are no real competitors to Flash. For most mainstream sites today, Flash is mandatory. (And no amount of boycott will change that.)
I think the best way to fix this is by subversion and infiltration. Boycotts don't work. They haven't worked with Vista and won't work with Flash.
The Linux community needs to stop thinking it can "boycott" things like protocols, and file formats and instead, work to make alternate applications that can work with those file formats and protocols to eat the other guy's lunch.
far from the now mature process of download/click/wait/enjoy, the process involved getting just the right software version, installing it manually in the correct location, maybe hacking around with .INI files and then crossing your fingers that the mean-time-between-crashes was longer than the time it took to print your document.
So it is with installing flash on FF3/U_x64. The process basically sucks and as said, provides a sufficiently bad user experience to turn normal people off Linux for years.
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I may be the only one here who finds this news. Although this is of course at least partially a symptom of my not caring about he iphone in general.
However, as my wife wants the iphone, I have to ask how this problem works. I thought most systems used flash for youtube - which leads me to the question of how does the iphone use youtube if it doesn't use flash?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Thank you for hitting the nail on the head. While everyone that uses Linux exclusively is saying "We need a well running flash player",we Windows users (only use Linux on the laptop for security reasons) will be happy to tell you that there ain't no such thing,certainly not from Adobe. If I build a machine and don't install flash on it,the browsers,be it Firefox,Kmeleon,Opera,IE,etc will be nice and stable. The second I install flash,well that is when the headaches begin. Random lockups,freezes,poor memory and CPU usage,etc. And as the above poster mentioned and I can attest to it isn't just when you are using flash either. It is just a buggy POS software.
Unfortunately it looks like we are stuck with it for now, just like we were stuck with Real files being all over the net in the 90's. I just hope silverlight doesn't take off,because after feeling threatened by Vista hatred and the netbooks showing up out of left field with Linux running on them I'm betting they really feel the need to lock-in everyone to Windows with a new format. Lets face it,MSFT has never really gotten the web,but getting folks locked into Windows,that they understand. I'm betting if silverlight stomps flash and takes over web video that a year or so down the line they'll come out with a new version that "requires a subset of features only available on Windows Presentation Foundation,which is currently available only on Windows Vista and Windows 7. Please use a compatible Operating System to view this site." And that will be that.
What we need is someone in the OSS community to come up with a completely free and open standard net video format to compete with flash/silverlight. It should run on all the major platforms(Windows,Linux,MacOSX,BSD) and have free editors,converters,etc,and finally have a better picture to size ratio than flash or silverlight. Then everyone could enjoy the Internet multimedia content,regardless of browser or OS. But asking for a non buggy flash,when the Windows version which is their bread and butter is buggy,is just pointless. But as always this is my 02c,YMMV
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
It's a threat to anybody that isn't able to use flash. And the fact that there aren't any good alternatives to their implementation is a pretty good reason to fear it as well.
As a FreeBSD user the only way I get to see flash is if I use wine to run a Windows version of Firefox. Which means that a great number of sites like youtube don't run in any meaningful manner without a lot of extra effort.
Just because I have a DSL line doesn't mean that I'm OK with sites that choose to waste a lot of it unnecessarily on overly complicated interfaces which ultimately just slow things down.
Same goes for processing power, I don't care if it's lost revenue, if the only ads available are flash, I'm not going to be clicking. There's absolutely no reason why flash ads need to be used. We've got gifs and pngs which can do pretty much all of that without risk of crashing the browser.
It's only a threat if you think the Internet should stay in the same configuration it was in in 1983, when a 1200 baud connection was considered fast
This isn't about the technology, not directly. There are two points to keep in mind here:
First, Flash is proprietary. Making the Internet depend on proprietary technology is destroying the one thing that makes the Internet great -- anyone can connect, from anything.
That is: The Internet thrives on open standards. Flash isn't open, and Silverlight is neither. (Yeah, I know about Moonlight -- how long till that gets hit with patents from Microsoft, though, if it starts to matter?)
Second: Flash is its own little ecosystem. HTML really is very powerful -- done right, it's possible to both style it up very richly with CSS, and yet keep the HTML itself so clean that it's machine readable -- so much so that people start to build microformats on top of it. Makes the job much easier for screenreaders, also, or for people who want to reskin the page (just load up a Greasemonkey script and add a stylesheet).
Flash supports none of these things. There is some mention of accessibility, yes, but it's nowhere near where HTML is.
HTML separates things into pages and sub-page anchors. It's possible to do this with Flash, but only by piggybacking on top of what HTML is already doing, and with a fair amount of Javascript.
That is: I can bookmark this comment, if I need to. I can link to it from another page, directly. If Slashdot was written in Flash, would I be able to?
I could go on. And on.
The only legitimate use of Flash is to add functionality which isn't yet in a browser, and to select chunks of the page -- that is, YouTube isn't entirely Flash, just the player. But that should only be a holdover until the necessary things are implemented in the browser.
Considering the level of citizen journalism that sites like YouTube and LiveLeak have enabled, all thanks to Flash...
No, thanks to embedded video, which existed long before Flash, and is finally being done in a standard way with the HTML5 video tag. YouTube never needed Flash, and still doesn't.
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I think Silverlight 2 will be huge.
I'm an old-school programmer with a CS background. I've programmed embedded systems, MVS, Unix and Windows using machine code, assembly languages, imperative languages, object-oriented languages and functional languages. And my absolute all-time favorite programming environment is C# in Visual Studio. C# is a really nice language, the BCL (the .Net class library) is huge (and for the most part very well designed) and Visual Studio hides all the usual programming cruft. (And for the 0.01% of the time that I actually need to care about the cruft, Visual Studio lets me tinker with it.)
Silverlight 2 is a slimmed-down .Net. It has WPF (the new UI framework, also in Silverlight 1) + the BCL + C# (or whatever other .Net language you like). It is a joy to program and if the cross platform support (Windows/Mac/Linux) works as promised I don't see how it can fail. It is very, very nice. Just one example of its loveliness: WPF is, without a doubt, the best effort to-date in separating presentation and content. It is much, much better than HTML+CSS.
Silverlight's only competitor, Flash, is relatively difficult to develop for because it is a thing in itself. On the other hand, there are already millions of C# programmers, of whom most will learn WPF and have no trouble developing Silverlight apps.
Indeed, I don't see how Silverlight 2 can fail.