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."

Comments

Flash sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

Adopt Silverlight!

Re:Flash sucks

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

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.

Re:Flash sucks

[Peet42]

Adopt Silverlight!

Indeed. Anything to get it away from its abusive parents.

Re:Flash sucks

[mikiN]

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.

Re:Flash sucks

[mikiN]

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.

Re:Flash sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Flash sucks

[darthdavid]

The reason why it won't ever supersede Flash or Silverlight is because it's not supposed to supersede Flash or Silverlight. SVG is designed for still vector images and animation on the order of animated gif (IE, short and no sound). Nothing else.

This means that both the parent and the grandparent are being dumb. SVG isn't meant to do what flash does and so the GP is ascribing abilities to it which it will never have and P is criticizing it for not doing things which it was never meant to do. Obligatory Car Analogy: GP suggests using a pickup truck to move a shipping trailer on a long-haul delivery. P says that pickup trucks suck because they can't pull shipping trailers very well and then calls everyone who drives one a smelly virgin.

As for online video, why the fuck is every sonofabitch out there making their own fucking flash client for video? Video should be distributed in a proper file none of this "Compress->Re-encode/resample for flash->stream to my computer" bullshit...

Re:Flash sucks

[Kjella]

Well, Microsoft officially endorse the open-source client, so I'd imagine that they have at least a somewhat vested interest in making sure that it works and remains compatible with the official windows/mac clients.

It's really a shame that people haven't embraced Silverlight, as it really does have the potential to be a lot better than Flash. Unfortunately, the Open-source community treated it with outright hostility, and it looks unlikely to catch us.

Long story short:
If you're trying to gain market share you'll get in bed with pretty much anyone for backing.
If you're trying to keep market share you'll sabotage any real compatbility and interoperability.

Microsoft is not trusted because they have a deeply vested interest in making sure that the only place things really work is on the Windows platform. So we help Microsoft kill flash and when Silverlight has momentum enough, they won't need us anymore. Then you have another Microsoft-controlled technology that ships by default with Windows tying people to the Windows platform, while the OSS community tries to pull off another half-assed dotnet clone which doesn't really work well. Adobe's support for Linux sucks, but replacing it with Microsoft won't be any better in the long run.

Re:Flash sucks

[Skye16]

(you may want to multitask whilst you're waiting. otherwise you just ruined *two* lives.)

Re:Flash sucks

[aliquis]

But Flash suck on OS X aswell, a couple of pages with flash ads can easily take all my processor power, no matter how much there is, which is just unacceptable.

What we need is to get rid of flash since it sucks balls, who needs it?

1) Flash are mostly used for ads, who wants ads? Especially if they move, makes sound, sits on top of other things, take lots of CPU power, memory and heats up your machine.

2) Flash are sometimes used to design complete webpages, which suck because they have to be navigated in a non-standard way, design goes over function, they take forever to load and I can't open lots of screenshots in multiple tabs...

3) Finally flash are used for videos, which I guess some people who don't have a clue like because that way they don't have to install any more codecs. But personally that's (youtube, gametrailers, and such) the only thing stopping me from removing flash completely, so I so much want this to change. Safari can handle video directly in the browser and I hope we see more of that, won't happen until the suckers with IE get the functionallity + couple of years extra I guess though :/
Even old embedded quicktime days was better.

Re:Flash sucks

[uhlume]

As for online video, why the fuck is every sonofabitch out there making their own fucking flash client for video? Video should be distributed in a proper file none of this "Compress->Re-encode/resample for flash->stream to my computer" bullshit...

Because it Just Works, and Flash is ubiquitous whether you like or not. According to the stats on the commercial site I maintain, upwards of 96% of visitors have some FLV-capable version Flash installed. That means I can deploy video without forcing some large percentage of my users to install yet another player/plugin/codec just to see it. That just isn't true of any other comparable streaming video technology.

Re:Flash sucks

[lordofthechia]

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.

Re:Flash sucks

[Blakey Rat]

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.

Flash

[XanC]

Flash (and Silverlight, et al) are a threat to the Internet generally. I wouldn't run Flash even if they bothered to create a version that runs on my OS (64-bit Linux).

The more of use that don't use Flash, the better.

Re:Flash

[j1m 5n0w]

I don't disagree that flash is bad for the web, but in order to convince developers not to use it, there needs to be a valid alternative. If youtube didn't use flash for video, what would they use instead? Animated gifs? Expecting a site like youtube to just not serve video because there isn't a free software way to do what they want to do is unreasonable.

We really need at least some form of video integrated into the browser, and it looks like we might have it in firefox soon, (better many years too late than never). Then, we can at least give sites the option of serving video to browsers that support theora but not flash.

Re:Flash

[XanC]

You've proven the case for multimedia on the Web. Not Flash.

Think of the level of citizen journalism, all the articles and ideas, that Microsoft Word has enabled. Therefore, we should all store and distribute .doc files instead of an open standard.

Re:Flash

[hedwards]

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.

Re:Flash

[SanityInAnarchy]

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.

Re:Flash

[xSauronx]

More posts that should be put in a distro-specific forum, instead of the slashdot front page. Im all for helping people, but some need to help themselves.

I never had any serious, regular problem, in the last year and a half, with Debian Etch or Any Ubuntu release since 6.10 (when i first used it) with flash. The oddball crash happens, but its nothing normal or that I can re-create (in epiphany browser or firefox)

With that, I link to "How to ask questions the smart way" or "christ, can you search first, then ask in the apporopriate place?" :

Clickity

Please understand I have nothing again helping anyone....but people should help themselves first. The flashplayer performance is horrible, but the OP lists no specifics to help him with his problem. Theres no distro name, no kernel or browser type or version given, no way anyone can help him.

The post is just a bitch and moan. This is slashdot, news for nerds, etc. There have been useful, interesting "Ask Slashdot" posts, but this is not one of them.

Re:Flash

[SanityInAnarchy]

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.

Re:Flash

[Zerth]

The internet isn't thriving, it is festering.

Re:Flash

[Ilgaz]

I tell you the issue with Quicktime and my personal favourite (really!) Real Player.

Flash player plugin is a single click install with a joke like 1.2 MB size, it lives inside browser, nothing added to startup.

Quicktime and Real missed the opportunity because of their size and old policies (Real, especially).

There is no way you can explain to Apple fans that adding a taskbar icon on Windows, bundling additional software with UI tricks (iTunes) are reasons of "death sentence" on Windows scene. I am sure there are similar thinking people at Apple themselves. Would you want rc.flash.startup in your /etc everytime you install Flash? It is same for them.

I see Real doing lots of things to get the download smaller with less user irritation but they still can't understand a basic trick: bare minimum framework+plugin. That is what Adobe does, even on recent Adobe Air.

HTML5 guys pushing ogg format really, really doesn't make sense. Media have gave up VP3 ages ago and you know as people having lawyers dedicated to copyright, they aren't that bugged about patents. Big media is arguing whether they should keep on MPEG4 or convert to H264. It seems new fashion tiny laptops saved MPEG4 fate ;)

Re:Flash

[jacquesm]

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.

Open Source Flash?

[Z00L00K]

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?

Re:Open Source Flash?

[JohnFluxx]

There is Gnash (http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/) but it still has a way to go

Re:Open Source Flash?

[LinuxInDallas]

It's not just the "interesting" content unfortunately.

There's a BBQ restaurant nearby that I occasionally order to-go from. If I was out of the house and wanted to get something on the way home I would pull their webpage up on my iPhone and order after looking at the online menu. Well guess what happened a couple months ago? They had their website redesigned with flash and provided no alternate webpage for those of us without flash players.

The use of flash in this case provided nothing for the site other than some fancy animation when the page first opens. I emailed the admin but have had no luck getting access to the old site provided via the new main page :(

Re:Open Source Flash?

[dotgain]

As do many packages that begin with 'G', I have to say...

Re:Open Source Flash?

[Omnifarious]

I've never been able to make any Flash site at all work with gnash (I'm currently using gnash 0.8.2). Though I'm using 64-bit Linux, so maybe that's the problem. Though I thought gnash was supposed to be written well enough that it wouldn't matter.

I don't want to install Adobe's player. The source isn't available for public scrutiny and it's a major piece of infrastructure. AFAIK it's sending encrypted ICMP packets to Adobe telling them every piece of Flash I download or some such stupidly evil thing.

Re:Open Source Flash?

[Pecisk]

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.

Re:Open Source Flash?

[theshowmecanuck]

This is not so trivial as not being able to play YouTube videos. There are many commercial sites that use flash for almost their entire content.

Along with that, I can tell you about a buddy of mine who works in the advertising industry: we were talking about Firefox and web sites and I mentioned to him about how much I hate flash and all the flashy crap (no pun intended) that distracts and pisses me off when I surf the web... so much so that I use Flashblock. His reply was, "yeah me and everyone I know in this industry try to get the programmers to put as much flashy flash stuff up on our different marketing web sites and advertising banners as possible... and loving it! We won't stop." (Paraphrased, but pretty damn close.)

So you see, just like photo shop, the graphic arts and marketing industry are major players driving this piece of crap scourge (sorry for not letting my real feeling for flash content show... it wouldn't be appropriate here).

Re:Open Source Flash?

[anagama]

Forget the admin -- he/she probably got paid for doing the Flash work and is glad to have the bucks. What you need to do, is walk in and ask to talk to the owner. Tell him/her his website design is causing him to lose business because you can no longer order dinner on your way home. This causes you to patronize other shops. As a small business owner myself, I can tell you that that sort of feedback has a 99.99% chance of getting serious attention. There's always an outlier here or there of course.

Re:Open Source Flash?

[93 Escort Wagon]

I agree with this - but it's important not to go off on some zealotry-driven rant (this being Slashdot) that's full of generalizations. Keep it simple, and explain the exact situation: There is no way to use the restaurant's new website on an iPhone, at all; while it used to work perfectly fine (make sure they realize this second part - something is broken that used to work well).

I've seen and heard plenty of zealotry-driven rants about the web, usually regarding Flash or Javascript. In the real world people don't care about your opinions regarding "good" or "evil" technologies. What they DO care about is something that isn't working in a practical manner.

A burger place may listen politely to a vegetarian, but they're not going to change much to accommodate that person. When a repeat customer is taking their business elsewhere, they're a bit more willing to make changes.

Re:Open Source Flash?

[johnw]

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.

Re:Open Source Flash?

[93 Escort Wagon]

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.

While the Slashdot story opined that "Flash on Linux is the one major entry barrier controlling acceptance of Linux as a viable desktop operating system", I think you've unintentionally hit on the real reason Linux isn't taken seriously in the desktop arena by the masses. How many times have we seen this exact scenario played out on Linux (e.g. in window managers, browsers, digital music, video, etc.)?

Re:Open Source Flash?

[pizzach]

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.

Crashes on Windows XP too

[calc]

Flash 9.0.124.0 crashes all the time on my wife's Windows XP system running Firefox as well. Most of the time it exhibits as not being able to play sound. So it definitely isn't limited to Linux. Flash is just crap.

I fixed this ages ago

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

I ask myself the same question

[jdb2]

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

Re:I ask myself the same question

[hairyfeet]

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

Flash as a service delivery platform

[wimmi]

Flash is a great channel to provide commercial products (video, ads, DRM'ed shit).
It's no threat at all when Flash isn't abused as website critical table of contents.

To comment on the OP: have you already tried the version 10 release candidate? It's supposed to support new audio API's and hardware acceleration.

Re:Flash as a service delivery platform

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

So it's true - if the OP and the subsequent comments are representative of a real problem: Pr0n is what drives the success of a net platform!

Elephant, meet room.

Re:Flash as a service delivery platform

[Bashae]

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.

Re:Flash as a service delivery platform

[Mad Merlin]

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.

They just don't care.

[Zombie Ryushu]

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.

Re:They just don't care.

[johndierks]

I'm a flash developer and I'll be the first to admit that the format has some major drawbacks.

The parent is correct though, there are no viable alternatives to the format. Nothing I know of provides the kinds of experience that flash is capable is. (see this site) Advertising drives the consumer side of the web and advertisers aren't going to move to less interactive or more static mediums. It also doesn't hurt that flash has a 99% penetration.

If there was a better platform with good penetration, while maintaining the ability to build rich interactivity, I'd be the first to jump.

Suggest reading Adobe's blogosplat

[Rosyna]

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)

and on X64 it's even worse

[petes_PoV]

Since switching to a 64-bit version of Ubuntu, I've been getting flashbacks to Win 3.1 and the trials and tribulations of installing printers and other drivers.

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.

Probably...

[quadelirus]

"I really do have to suspect Adobe's motivation for keeping Flash on Linux in such a deplorable state."

This is an irksome statement. I doubt Adobe has an interest in making Linux look bad. Isn't there a saying, "never ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence."

Probably what would work better here is, "never ascribe to malice what can be explained by business sense." Linux is 4%ish of the desktop market so it would make sense that 4% (or less, but certainly not more) of Adobe flash development go to linux porting. 4% of their development just isn't going to make Flash as good as it is on other platforms, and I doubt they are receiving a lot of money from linux distros to change this.

Yeah it sucks if you use linux but no need to point a finger at Adobe. Its simple dollars and cents (or sense).

This story also needs an update.

[HomerJ]

There's various bug reports about this with regards to Pulseaudio and Flash--as well as numerous othat applications--in all major distributions that have packaged Pulseaudio by default. I'm not going to link all the bug reports in a slashdot comment, but you can search for them yourself.

The story and summary seems to be calling out Adobe on this issue, when it's not really their fault. If PA didn't have as many compatibility issues with alsa applications as it has, Flash would work fine.

It's unfair to call out Adobe on this issue. It expects a working alsa implementation, and when it has to use Pluseaudio's version of the virtual device, it crashes. Adobe doesn't have any control over the faultily implementation. So if there's a story that's about Flash crashing fine, but let's put the blame where it belongs here.

iphone, no flash?

[damn_registrars]

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?

OH RLY

[ArchieBunker]

Have some tcpdump or ngrep logs to show such behavior? Or maybe your tinfoil hat is too tight.

Stop browser crashes with nspluginwrapper

[Niten]

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.

Guide to getting flash working perfectly on hardy

[dyftm]

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.

Flash is not broken, it's your distribution!

[psyke83]

The original poster of this article is experiencing bugs with his or her distribution, *not* merely with Flash. There are several issues at work here.

a) Flash 10 RC is the first version to support "windowless mode" flash content that several sites use. Unfortunately, there is a bug in Firefox that causes "windowless mode" content to crash. It is not a bug caused by Adobe Flash; un fact, the newest version of swfdec (which also added support for "windowless mode" content) also causes Firefox to crash. This fix is due for release in Firefox 3.0.2 and a workaround is available for older releases already. See: https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/239182

b) Ubuntu Hardy was the first release to integrate PulseAudio, but its default configuration can cause a lot of trouble for users. PulseAudio provides ALSA plugins that enable plain ALSA applications to work correctly with PulseAudio; these plugins are supposed to be enabled by default. Some (buggy) applications do not work correctly using these plugins, including Flash 9 and Audacity. Hardy was released without these plugin enabled, causing many audio mixing problems for users. See: https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/198453

c) It appears the original poster is using the libflashsupport library, which is a workaround to enable PulseAudio support in Flash without the need for the ALSA plugins mentioned in point (b) to be enabled. There is a bug in Flash when using the libflashsupport API; closing and opening new flash streams will result in a crash (such as navigating from one Youtube page to another). See: https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/192888

d) Flash 10 has fixed its ALSA implementation, allowing it to work correctly with the PulseAudio ALSA plugins as mentioned in point (b) - this means that the (buggy) libflashsupport library is now redundant.

Note that all the above bugs contain links to the upstream issues when applicable. For those too lazy to follow the individual bugs, I have posted a guide to configure PulseAudio (and Flash 10) correctly for Ubuntu users, complete with testing packages. See: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=789578

What problems?

[Alex Belits]

I am not a fan of Flash, however I have not seen any problems with Flash on Linux since they ended the enormous version lag that broken some sites when Windows hd flash 8 and Linux port stopped development at 7. Flash on Linux is a massive resource eater, has idiotic installation procedure, often has to be updated because of security bugs, however it has exactly the same problems on Windows. It is more crappy and unfixable than most Linux software, however this says more about the level of quality that is considered acceptable on Windows rather than about any deficiencies specific to a Linux port.

As for Youtube, why would a Linux user want to use their flash-based player? Install latest version of clive, mplayer and xclip, and run this script after selecting or copying Youtube URL:

#!/bin/sh
cd "$HOME"
cd Desktop 2>/dev/null
xterm -bg "#ffffff" -fg "#000000" -cr "#800000" -ah -fa "DejaVu Sans Mono" -fs 14 -g 80x6 -T "Video Download" \
-e sh -c \
'xclip -o | clive "--player=mplayer -fs %i" --play=src --mask=custom'

(assign it to some panel launcher or menu in your desktop environent).

Flash does SO much more than just video.

[arete]

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.

Re:C&C: generals

[d3ac0n]

Keep in mind though, that using a no CD crack is pretty much a requirement for running many games in Windows too. All convenience issues aside, SecuROM and other DRM can actually break the games' ability to run in many systems CD or not. To say nothing of various Windows issues you may have due to the DRM. So after you buy the game, you frequently need either a No-CD cracked .exe, or you just pirate the damn thing and leave the unopened game on your shelf.

In regards to Flash, I've never actually had an issue with it. I run Ubuntu 8.04 and the non-free binary version of Flash and Firefox has no issues whatsoever with YouTube or any Flash site. Indeed, I've not had a problem with flash since Ubuntu 5.10 or thereabouts. Now, Shockwave, that's another issue. It doesn't work AT ALL. I'd like to see a fix for that sometime this millenium.