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Linux Now an Equal Flash Player
nerdyH writes "As recently as 2007, Linux users waited six months for Flash 9 to arrive. Now, with Microsoft pushing its Silverlight alternative, Adobe is touting the universality of its Flash format, which has penetrated '98 percent of Internet-enabled desktops,' it claims. And, it today released Flash 10 for Linux concurrently with other platforms. Welcome to the future." Handily enough, Real Networks released this summer RealPlayer 11 for Linux, the first release for which they've included a .deb package, and offers nightly builds of their Helix player, for which Linux is one of the supported platforms.
Now make them do the same with Photoshop.
And this is a good example! Why change, update, or innovate if you have no competition? Throw a little in there and all of a sudden the things people actually wanted, are given!
We need a proper Open Source flash as a BSD user I am still jaded by flashes lack of support
There's still no 64-bit version yet!
Follow me
But still not open-source. So if you need it on PPC Linux, or FreeBSD, you are still SOL. Give us the source guys, and we'll maintain it for you. Or if you absolutely cant do that, publish a spec that somebody can use to write compatible player.
-- Home is where you eat your heart out.
Adobe would just encourage more webmasters to write actual code instead of relying on flash for their entire websites.
But of course there wouldn't be much profit incentive for Adobe to do such a thing...
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
First of all, as some have already pointed out, where's the *BSD binaries and 64-bit binaries?
Why doesn't Adobe go (L)GPLv3 with their flash plugin, keep all the products that produce flashes commercial and watch how other people (while being angry at their original plugin's performance) fix their bad code?
In all seriousness, what bad could releasing flash renderer as a GPLv3 or LGPLv3 mean for adobe? They have the market for 90s style websites (one big graphic) and 100% of Internet's video sites already, their actual closed source not so well performing plugin is the first reason why people don't think flash is great for anything other than attracting teenager users.
If the do not open source it, one day it will a better alternative will grow out of the open source community or flash simply ceases to exist as it's replaced by more open standard X or better renderer Y.
Seriously. On my gf's Vista machine, Flash hanging in IE is *the* major reliability issue over the past 6 months.
[Vista has this "system reliability" thingy which is actually cool (oops there goes my slashdot karma). It gives an overall score on how reliable the system is and charts it over time, showing what apps crashed or hung to reduce the score.]
Still, I have flash on my linux desktop which will never, ever, ever have silverlight installed on it.
Yeah. I thought the same thing. Real represented every wrong way to market and produce a product. It was neat in the beginning (well, it was pretty much the first, as far as I know), but as time went on, it became a bloated, spyware ridden piece of garbage far inferior to all of its competitors.
Honestly, I didn't know Real was still around. I wouldn't let that software near my windows machines, much less the Linux ones.
The Internet is generally stupid
Currently my laptop doesn't handle heat very well (freezes up on me),
+1 Ironic
Flashblock. Seriously. That way you get to selectively enable Flash media rather than being carpet-bombed on pageload.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
The SWF file format specifications have been published for a decade. Just like HTML.
The sourcecode to the canonical implementation has not, just like most of the HTML browsers out there.
Adobe licenses high-quality video decoders from third-parties, so it's difficult to have an ideologically-pure Player.
jd/adobe
That would be a more plausible explanation if they didn't have a version for Solaris on Sparc. I'm more inclined to believe that the root problem is unwillingness to devote the resources.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
While it's difficult for me to understand the need to watch movies on your telephone, I guess I could see the appeal to some.
But if I were to get a phone that could play videos, I'd want to to play videos in a non-proprietary standard. My guess is, Nokia entered some deal with Real to put it on there.
As for acrobat not working, wait for them to port Foxit to your phone. You might actually be able to view PDFs.
The Internet is generally stupid
and there are much better solutions for video.
Considering Flash is what made video on the web actually viable and reliable, I would like to hear of these "much better" solutions. You apparently don't remember the Bad Old Days before Flash video when streaming video worked about 10% of the time, and when it did work, it took about 60 seconds to start up.
Say what you want about Flash, but it works pretty damn well.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
So did they fix the *really* annoying problem where on linux firefox configurations that flash objects appear ontop of *everything* else in the page? This annoyance has made many pages very much un-usable (especially ones with drop down menus where the menu gets hidden behind the flash object :( ...adobe's own site fits into this catagory).
...But please, lets be realistic.
In your minds, if company Z doesn't support Linux, they lose. If they do support linux, they lose even worse. They get screamed at for not releasing specs, not GPL'ing the source, not supporting a specific distribution, not supporting 64-bit... the list goes on.
Now if you're going to take the time to respond to this, please answer me this: Why should company X spend the most time supporting a platform that has the least marketshare?
Linux folk see the problem being that software vendors don't support linux. The fact of the matter is Linux doesn't support ISV's. There are a million different distro's with no standardization. You already have your market share working against you, and you realize that. What you don't seem to realize is that your platform is the hardest to develop for and support.
You really should do something about this before you scream with a sense of entitlement that some company should spend time and money supporting your platform when it is not likely to be financially viable.
Similes are like metaphors
And a major company can finish porting a program to a new, reasonably similar, platform in less than 6 years. Sorry, lame excuses about porting to 64 bit being hard were great in 2005 or so, but at this point it's completely clear that there's no 64 bit flash player simply because Macromedia / Adobe has chosen not to devote the resources to it. It's not like they're the ones who will get shit when web browsers hit the 2GB barrier.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Maybe a post from 2006 (summarizing an explanation from 2005) is not the best thing. At the end of the day, the excuses seem lame. Java had 64-bit support out pretty quickly (are you telling me the JIT in Flash is more complicated than the Java JVM, of which the JIT is a minor portion?)
The reason is that Adobe doesn't feel there's a big enough market for 64-bit platforms, thus it doesn't throw many resources at getting a 64-bit version, end of story.
That was also written, oh, two fucking years ago! They haven't figured out how to make their JIT compiler work in two years? What kind of incompetents are they? I'm sure it's a hard problem. Lots of problems are hard. But somehow Firefox and Opera and even IE managed to get their Javascript code working on 64bit platforms in the meantime. Why is Flash somehow special?
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Specific distribution: Supporting all distributions isn't hard, you know.
No. Supporting Linux is not hard at all. It's not like you have to release 10 different packages for each distribution you support... and stuff.
Flip it around and ask yourself why shouldn't company X spend a little time making something cross-platform (it's not as hard as you think) and get that many more sales?
You say "It's not as hard as you think." I say, "It's easier said than done."
This just screams troll right here. I find it a pain to develop for Windows myself given that libraries and headers can be all over the place, or are you thinking of RAD C# stuff that is useless for many applications (note I'm saying it's useless for things like, say, Flash; it certainly has a use for smaller programs and other apps that don't need speed, etc).
Yeah, I'm a troll. Instead of developing a modern tool chain, linux folk scream, "Emacs/VIM, the GNU toolchain and a command line debugger is all you will ever need!" Which, wherein lies the most fundamental problem of the Linux crowd, they feel entitled to tell people what they should want and need, rather than listen to what people want and need. And then you call them a troll.
Similes are like metaphors
Now if you're going to take the time to respond to this, please answer me this: Why should company X spend the most time supporting a platform that has the least marketshare?
At one point back in 1995, the Microsoft Windows market was only 20% of the PC market. The other 75% of the market was OS/2, QNX, DrDos, Novell and a few others. Windows was an emerging market so we coded for it.
Linux is now an emerging (or growth) market. Ignore it if you want. Your competitors are not.
There is a reason that google has released Picasa and GoogleEarth binaries for linux and its not because of a bunch of hippies yelling at them demanding the code. There is a reason that Dell is still continuing its Linux line of products. Asus, Adobe, Quicken, Oracle, Real, etc, do not make their product support decisions based on a bunch of screaming smelly basement dwellers.
What you don't seem to realize is that your platform is the hardest to develop for and support.
Linux is the hardest platform to develop for if all you know how to code in is Microsoft based technologies.
Enjoy,
It's just the normal noises in here.
The "we'll maintain it for you" line has not particularly been borne out by experience.... ;-)
Well said from a closed source company. Heck, we might even be able to resolve all the serious flaws in your code. *cough* cookie *cough*
Gnash 0.8.4 was released yesterday, but I guess that doesn't merit a slashvertisement:
http://gnashdev.org/
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
Someone on Slashdot who finally gets it.
I go a step further, and say that 'Linux' is not a platform at all if you're an end-user or starting out in app development.
Don't get me wrong... I'm LPI certified and use various distros on a daily basis for all sorts of things. But I am far from an average user or even power user.
I know that Wikipedia isn't considered the most reliable source of information, but it does give some links to relevant information should we care to look for it.
If we examine the OS spectrum (as software companies no doubtedly do) (see Usage Share of Desktop Operating Systems for an example), Linux comprises 2% of the share. We're excluding servers on purpose, for the sake of this argument, since end-users will no doubt be the ones interested in things like Flash. Let's say those numbers are deflated, and Linux really is about 5%. Of that 5% how many have made the transition to 64-bit? 50%? That means 2.5% of my potential target audience needs a 64-bit product.
Is that fair though? Not really. I'm typing this reply on a perfectly suitable 32-bit Linux on a processor that supports x86-64. Why? Unnecessary. I get proven, stable applications with 32-bit that perfectly suit my needs. I'd say for the DESKTOP OS, there my have been a reality of 25% who use a 64-bit Linux (and that, too, is probably high)
So, with our modified numbers, 1.25% need a 64-bit flash player, while the 98.75% of my potential user base is perfectly fine with my 32-bit product. I think the numbers speak for themselves.
Ayup