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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."
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.
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
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.
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.
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 :(
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.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
As do many packages that begin with 'G', I have to say...
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).
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
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.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
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.
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.
Indeed. Anything to get it away from its abusive parents.
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()!
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).
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
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.
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...
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.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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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