Adobe (Temporarily?) Kills 64-Bit Flash For Linux

An anonymous reader writes "It seems that with the release of the 10.1 security patches, Adobe has, at least temporarily, killed 64-bit Flash for Linux. The statement says: 'The Flash Player 10.1 64-bit Linux beta is closed. We remain committed to delivering 64-bit support in a future release of Flash Player. No further information is available at this time. Please feel free to continue your discussions on the Flash Player 10.1 desktop forums.' The 64-bit forum has been set to read-only."

Comments

Fuck flash

[Anonymous Coward]

I never had a player installed. And I'm doing just fine.

It's just yet another proprietary lock-in. And most of the time it serves just waste.

Re:Fuck flash

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

I never had a player installed. And I'm doing just fine.

It's just yet another proprietary lock-in. And most of the time it serves just waste.

Unless we're talking about phones. Then Flash is a must-have and any (i)phone that doesn't have it is a completely useless piece of garbage.

Re:Fuck flash

[poetmatt]

hahaha. nice post.

I do think it's a bit overboard to say flash MUST be on any phone. However, it's nice to actually have the option, not unlike a computer (including apple pc's) and quite unlike the direct jab at iphone/ipod.

Re:Fuck flash

[kno3]

Hmm, it does make life easier viewing youtube (i know there are other ways like html5, but that is still rather clunky), iplayer, etc... I would be very happy with adobe dropping support for flash entirely. Then we would very quickly move into a much more preferable situation. But dropping support just for the 64bit is a bit annoying, as it wont really push content providers to move away from flash, but it will unfairly hinder a (small) section of users.

Re:Fuck flash

[Binary Boy]

Whoosh.

Re:Fuck flash

[Anonymous Coward]

this was modded insightful? I assumed he was going for funny. If you take the statement at face value then all phones are "completely useless piece[s] of garbage." What phone has a functioning flash plugin, much less with feature parity to the windows desktop version?

Re:Fuck flash

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally, I have always hated all phones, and regard even the ones that _do_ have flash with contempt.

Re:Fuck flash

[sobachatina]

It's ok. The grandparent was speaking sarcastically and referring the the ./ groupthink on the subject.

Either way- the discussion about Flash on Linux with Adobe as the villain is not unlike Flash on the iPhone with Apple as the villain.
In both cases a corporation is leveraging a proprietary platform to the detriment of some customers.

It doesn't really matter that Flash is terrible and useless- it isn't Apple's place to tell me what I can or can't do with *my* phone. I may be an outlier but I won't be a customer as long as Apple behaves like they maintain some sort of ownership over their customer's possessions.

Re:Fuck flash

[Kz]

Honestly, I don't know anyone who uses Flash for things other than video...

It's also quite good to provide HTML5 capabilities to prehistoric browsers. a great example is svgWeb, which lets you use SVG in any (almost) browser. if possible, will be native SVG, if not, it loads a flash renderer. ... or for better-than-terrible uploads, SWFuploader is a real lifesaver. ... or for local storage, as per PersistJS

IOW, in a perfect world, nobody would need it. but we do.

Re:Fuck flash

[jc42]

Unless we're talking about phones. Then Flash is a must-have and any (i)phone that doesn't have it is a completely useless piece of garbage.

Hmmm ... I see that this comment got two "insightful" mods, and one "funny". This is added data to support the widespread belief that /. mods generally lack a sense of humor.

Of course, I can say that because I'm not at the moment a moderator. But recently I've had mod status more than I haven't, so I suppose any hour now I'll have to change my tune.

Actually, I have an Android G1 phone, and I don't miss Flash on it. At least I think it doesn't have it, because I don't see any annoying moving ads, which is most of what Flash is used for. I'm typing this on my Macbook Pro, where I do most of my browsing using firefox, and that's mostly because it supports NoScript, which is quite good at blocking Flash ads. In the rare case that I actually want to see a Flash video, I usually start up Safari and copy the URL to it, because that's faster than trying to figure out how to get FF to show just the one Flash thingy without accidentally enabling it for the ads.

I do hope that when we've all moved to HTML5, it'll be as easy to block video ads as it is with the current FF. If not, it'll be a step backwards.

Re:Fuck flash

[skydyr]

You might want to try the flashblock addon. It blocks all flash by default but shows an icon where the flash would be, so you can click on any given flash object to enable it and only it.

Re:Fuck flash

[jc42]

Yeah; I forgot to mention that I have flashblock, too. Though I'm a bit fuzzy on its interaction with NoScript. Their functionality seems to overlap quite a bit.

Re:Fuck flash

[icebraining]

NoScript does exactly that - it puts a placeholder in place of the object element. But, sometimes Flash is loaded by Javascript (example: SWFobject), which means that NoScript will block it before the Object element is placed at all. So if you have NoScript, Flashblock is useless, unless you specifically want to load Javascript but not Flash, which is uncommon.

Re:Fuck flash

[rwa2]

Honestly, I don't know anyone who uses Flash for things other than video... and Flash isn't particularly good at video so what's the point in fighting improvements?

Games?

Re:Fuck flash

[Anonymous Coward]

> It doesn't really matter that Flash is terrible and useless- it isn't Apple's place to tell me what I can or can't do with *my* phone.

That'd be fine if that was the point the Slashdot GroupThinkTM was making. Usually it's "I like the word 'Insightful' next to my post and it's fashionable to hate Apple!"

I know I'm not the only one sick of the 'complain first, rationalize later' mentality here. "Ah, this is a thread about Android! I know, I'll use the phrase 'Walled Garden' and get a mod point spent on my post!" It's repetitive, obnoxious, and breeds both fanbois and haters. We already learned this with Microsoft, but it's so gosh dern fun.

Re:Fuck flash

[Rakarra]

It doesn't really matter that Flash is terrible and useless- it isn't Apple's place to tell me what I can or can't do with *my* phone. I may be an outlier but I won't be a customer as long as Apple behaves like they maintain some sort of ownership over their customer's possessions.

Get used to it if you want to deal with Apple devices. Apple is very aggressively moving down the path towards the locked-down experience, where they decide how you use your devices and what you do with them. They say their customers don't want choices, they just want the Apple experience.

Jobs smugly says that the PC world, where the user has a billion choices for just about every decision, is dying (just like BSD). In their mind, it is ABSOLUTELY Apple's place to tell you what you can do with Apple's phone.

So, good for you for you for not supporting them if this is against your notion of what computing devices should be and how they should behave. I think Apple's philosophy is pretty damned dangerous to open computing.

Re:Fuck flash

[Anonymous Coward]

How about don't buy one then?

Re:Fuck flash

[Anonymous Coward]

here here

Re:Fuck flash

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet you use keyboard only to input to the text only non GUI display on your monochrome monitor. The rest of us have moved on from 1995.

Re:Fuck flash

[allo]

NoScript does not need Flashblock. Enable Noscript plugin-blocking, and you get a flashblock-like function.

Re:Fuck flash

[Anonymous Coward]

How about don't buy one then?

I'm pretty sure Apple's philosophy is strongly against not buying an iPhone. Do you really want to go against Apple's philosophy?

Re:Fuck flash

[Twitch6000]

Hahahaha I guess you never watch youtube or any other videos then huh.. I say this because gnash sucks balls.. YOu say you dislike propriestary software,but I can bet 100 dollars you have a piece somewhere on your computer. Your bios prehaps ;).

Re:Fuck flash

[His Shadow]

Yeah, I was reading just the other day of that proprietary Apple plugin technology. I think it was called "HTML5" or something like that. You can't watch ads on your iPhone. Boo Fucking Hoo. Jobs is such a BASTARD!.

Flash Sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

That's one down. Now, get them to cancel flash on i386 Linux, then on MacOS, then Windows, and we'll be all set.

Re:Flash Sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

Yyyeeeppp!

Flash sucks. Good thing uncle Steve gave Adobe the finger; that's just the start.

The sooner we all ditch flash, the better.

Re:Flash Sucks

[Bing Tsher E]

That's one down.(.05% of market) Now, get them to cancel flash on i386 Linux,(another .5%) then on MacOS,(another 8%) then Windows,(not happening) and we'll be all set. You're already 'set' it seems.

Re:Flash Sucks

[Hurricane78]

You don’t get it. It still works the other way around.
Most people will have one more reason to stop using Linux when they want to use 64bit.
If you converted some girl or your mother to Linux, and because you had a 64 bit CPU chose 64 bit Linux, prepare for her to complain until Flash works again.

Flash games are important to users. Unless they work you can completely forget converting someone to (64 bit) Linux for now.

Re:Flash Sucks

[3vi1]

>> prepare for her to complain until Flash works again.

Don't most distros just wrap the 32-bit version in an installer because the 64-bit version NEVER WORKED (for an equal amount of content and without crashing)?

Adobe wants us to side with them in their "We want flash on the iPhone" war, but their track record for supporting us on non-Windows platforms clearly states that they are not up to the job.

The sad part is, Microsoft is laughing their head off and planning to rope everyone back into Windows with Silverlight, while Moonlight either falls behind and rots on the vine or suffers from incomplete support due to patent issues.

Re:Flash Sucks

[gmack]

The latest beta was actually quite stable and even the first beta was a lot more stable than 32bit+nspluginwrapper,

Re:Flash Sucks

[VulpesFoxnik]

Debian lacks the 32bit libraries to make flash 32bit in nspwrapper to work. We are forced if we use 64 bit to used 64bit flash... now that thats gone... I guess I'll be installing gnash.

Hulu hasn't worked since february anyway.

flash killer

[Anonymous Coward]

First Apple, and now Adobe as the new flash killer. Good job

Re:flash killer

[Anonymous Coward]

serious lols - yeah right - the lack of a 64 bit linux flash player will kill flash fer sure!

most of the below comments will echo this laughable brand of nonsense.

however sad the mindset or the situations in life that leads people to the state where they actually believe this kind of thing, at the very least it can provide light comic relief for those of us in the real world. keep it up!

Re:flash killer

[rumith]

...For everything else, there's SmokeScreen.

Re:flash killer

[iainl]

Hey, at least you Linux lot had a 64-bit Flash in the first place. Us poor Windows users have to drop to the 32-bit browser if we want to run pointless rubbish (well, excluding Windows itself, but you know what I mean).

Re:flash killer

[mick232]

It is a perfectly valid and persuasive argument for anyone who argues that Flash lacks platform independence. It may not kill Flash, but it is one more step towards its disappearance.

This is why Flash must die.

[LWATCDR]

Yea Flash is an Open standard....
Let's move on to HTML5 and or even JavaFX and drop this none standard standard.

Re:This is why Flash must die.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, except Java applets work worse than Flash on my system. Simply going to a page with an applet causes the browser to lock up. The only way to do anything with Firefox at this point is to kill it then launch it again.

Re:This is why Flash must die.

[linuxgeek64]

JavaFX is proprietary.

Re:This is why Flash must die.

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's move on to HTML5 and or even JavaFX and drop this none standard standard.

Oh yeah, sure, because that will be much better. Ohh, how about we all use Silverlight instead?!

Re:This is why Flash must die.

[Richard_at_work]

Having done a fair bit with HTML5 video over the past few weeks, I can safely say that although its looking good, and I enjoyed producing HTML5 video apps, its not a flash killer yet.

They need to sort out the HTML5 subtitle standard, and someone needs to actually support it.

They need to sort out the cue points standard, and someone needs to support it. (No, events fired every X ms or so is not enough)

They need to eliminate cross browser issues with overlaying html over the video stream.

They need to enable adaptive streaming.

They need to do a lot more work, but what has been done so far is very nice.

Re:This is why Flash must die.

[LingNoi]

They need to sort out the HTML5 subtitle standard, and someone needs to actually support it.

They need to sort out the cue points standard, and someone needs to support it. (No, events fired every X ms or so is not enough)

What's wrong with the jquery srt plugin?

They need to eliminate cross browser issues with overlaying html over the video stream.

What issues?

Re:This is why Flash must die.

[Jeng]

Perhaps it's an issue with your system.

Just because it has issues on your system doesn't mean it doesn't work for everyone else.

Re:This is why Flash must die.

[Richard_at_work]

They need to sort out the HTML5 subtitle standard, and someone needs to actually support it.

They need to sort out the cue points standard, and someone needs to support it. (No, events fired every X ms or so is not enough)

What's wrong with the jquery srt plugin?

It ties you down to one javascript framework - its really something that should be provided by the <video> element itself, and handled by the player, not by external javascript. Having to handle subtitles externally is like having to handle the audio separately.

They need to eliminate cross browser issues with overlaying html over the video stream.

What issues?

I have seen issues where, although rendered above the video stream, links are not clickable, and other issues where components that should be rendered above are infact rendered below the stream.

Re:This is why Flash must die.

[Anonymous Coward]

It happens on multiple different systems with different Linux distros.

Re:This is why Flash must die.

[datapharmer]

Perhaps it is an issue with firefox (at least on mac, but I've heard complaints from PC users lately too). Flash, heavy java or even javascript and the browser grinds to a halt. Leave it open with more than 3 or 4 tabs and it gets slower and slower until after about 30 hours of being open it must be force quit.

With plugin support in chrome and safari I might leave for good - web kit is really kicking the crap out of gecko right now performance and reliability wise.

Re:This is why Flash must die.

[datapharmer]

did you set your z-indexes properly? Did you account for all browsers when you wrote the video tags? I ran into trouble with buttons when there were multiple formats for fallback and messing with the video tags a bit seemed to straighten things out in the troubled browsers (chrome seems to be the far most forgiving and safari the least forgiving with multiple formats, but I haven't checked safari 5 yet).

Re:This is why Flash must die.

[LingNoi]

It ties you down to one javascript framework - its really something that should be provided by the video element itself

No, it shouldn't. There's a million ways you could do subtitles. There are lots of different formats and there are many ways you could serve up the subtitle content that restricting it to a certain way only limits a developer.

I have seen issues where, although rendered above the video stream, links are not clickable, and other issues where components that should be rendered above are infact rendered below the stream.

I haven't experienced any of these issues and it sounds like your z-index is the problem.

Re:This is why Flash must die.

[MightyMartian]

Then you don't know how to install it, or you're doing something pretty goddamned weird. I haven't had a problem with the Java plugin in Linux in about eight years.

Re:This is why Flash must die.

[Richard_at_work]

did you set your z-indexes properly?

Yes

Did you account for all browsers when you wrote the video tags?

Thats the issue - we have 5 established web browsers today (Opera, Safari, Chrome, Firefox and IE), 4 of which have professed a desire to work closely toward a standard - in this day and age, why should there have to be accommodations made for different browsers when targetting a brand new standard? If the browsers can implement it differently enough that you have to code to the browser rather than the standard, the standard is not strict enough.

Re:This is why Flash must die.

[Richard_at_work]

No, it shouldn't. There's a million ways you could do subtitles. There are lots of different formats and there are many ways you could serve up the subtitle content that restricting it to a certain way only limits a developer.

So its OK to set standards for everything else, except for the things you don't want them to?

I have seen issues where, although rendered above the video stream, links are not clickable, and other issues where components that should be rendered above are infact rendered below the stream.

I haven't experienced any of these issues and it sounds like your z-index is the problem.

Z-indexes are not the cause of the issues I am seeing (why should anything in a container div be in a different z-index to its parent when not set explicitly?)

Re:This is why Flash must die.

[LingNoi]

So its OK to set standards for everything else, except for the things you don't want them to?

If you're just going to make stuff up and argue with things I didn't say in the first place I think we're pretty much done here..

Re:This is why Flash must die.

[AnonymousClown]

Yea Flash is an Open standard....

I keep seeing that. If that's true then why is it that I must get updates from Adobe in order for Flash to function?

Re:This is why Flash must die.

[Khyber]

I'll bet it's a RAM issue. My experience with Linux is if you're doing EVERYTHING right and you're running from default configs, odds are you've got a hardware issue, and quite often, that ends up being RAM.

Same shit used to happen OFTEN from OSX 10.2.7 up to 10.4 when I worked at Flextronics. Programs would not run - the fix was to replace the RAM and re-image with the default image for that machine..

Re:This is why Flash must die.

[dr. chuck bunsen]

Did you account for all browsers when you wrote the video tags?

This is exactly why Flash will always be relevant. HTML5 is fucking retarded for so many reasons, but everyone is running around acting like a bunch of children about it? How long before people come to their senses on this one?

Re:This is why Flash must die.

[Anonymous Coward]

because it's not a standard yet and browser vendor are encouraged by the w3c to use vendor specific prefixes for the time being.

Re:This is why Flash must die.

[Cougar Town]

I use Chrome (5.0.375.70 on 64-bit Ubuntu 9.10) and I find it leaks memory like crazy. I do use it for my daily browsing because like you said it's quite fast... but if I leave it running over night, I come back to work the next morning to find it's consumed all free memory on my system and even enough more to push other apps out to swap. The whole system is horribly slow and killing Chrome instantly frees up half of my RAM and puts things back to normal. If I leave it over a weekend, I might as well just hard reset the machine instead of spending 15 minutes waiting for swap so I can kill Chrome and let things come back into RAM. This is on an i7 980X w/6 GB, so it's not exactly a low-end system.

It seems to be sites like Facebook with regular dynamic updates that do it. I've started just closing Chrome when I leave for the day.

Re:This is why Flash must die.

[dr. chuck bunsen]

Because you installed the "Adobe Flash Player". There are other open source Flash players, and there are plenty of other open source projects providing tools to create flash content. And even if it weren't true, I don't see your point? It very much IS an open standard, and has been for some time. I don't see how you using Adobe products makes it not an open standard?

Re:This is why Flash must die.

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because it has issues on your system doesn't mean it doesn't work for everyone else.

I don't understand. Everyone... else? Who is this "everyone else"? My computer doesn't work. That constitutes Flash not working, right? I'm also really really smart so I think I know this better than all you figments of my imagination.

Re:This is why Flash must die.

[Sancho]

But seriously, what's the difference between an audio stream and a subtitle stream that means that one should be part of the standard while the other shouldn't? Or do you think that all three of the main types of streams (including video) should be standardized in a way that the developer has to do more work, but gets more flexibility?

We're already fairly restricted in our video stream, and in a very undesirable way--that is, different sets of codecs are supported by different browsers, and there is no single codec supported by all browsers.

I actually don't know much about how the audio works, but there are lots of ways to do audio, too.

Since you can overlay on top of HTML5 video, there's really no reason that a developer couldn't roll his own subtitles. But it would be really nice if the video element had a way of doing it that was standard.

Re:This is why Flash must die.

[dcavanaugh]

As crazy as it seems, you might be right. Notice that your solution re-images the machine, so that hard drive anomalies would be taken care of as well. I have had bizarre hardware problems with disk I/O (a flawed cable in one case that was really tough to diagnose). This led to corrupt files, as well as the occasional RAM issue. Bad RAM can easily lead to corrupted files if the bad bytes in memory are written faithfully to the disk.

Another possibility is running the wrong version JRE for the applet. Some applets are VERY picky. I have seen situations where newer versions were not always backwards compatible.

Re:This is why Flash must die.

[LWATCDR]

Which FOSS player will play Hulu and which will play YouTube?
Show me on that will play Hulu and I will agree that Flash is a proper open standard.

Re:This is why Flash must die.

[Khyber]

God sometimes Java compatibility is as bad as RPM Hell.

Re:This is why Flash must die.

[Hurricane78]

Uuum, it’s called Matroska (MKV), it’s already the dominant codec for HD videos in P2P file sharing, because of its feature-richness and because it’s basically binary XML, which is a neat thing.
It’s made to be streamable, even with all the features you could ever imagine. Including 3D, as many streams of anything (video,audio,subtitles,etc) as you want, chapters, metadata, and arbitrary custom extended tags. So even if one client can’t use a extension, it will play.

Google already likes it so much that they support a subset of it in Chrome. (Understandable, considering the number of features.)

Re:This is why Flash must die.

[d2globalinc]

Im sick of these uninformed idiots thinking flash is all about VIDEO.. video is a small piece of the possibilities with flash... It also makes a great cross-platform application development platform, expec with AIR. Steve Jobs doesn't want flash because it would mean the end of his money train called the app store, it has nothing to do with steve's qwest for perfection.. If steve was that into performance, security, etc - he would have stopped making QUICKTIME a long time ago. Flash push'd quicktime outa the way, and thanks to youtube made it the key piece for internet video. Steve has never let that go.. Flash is a GOOD thing for all of us because it means no one OS, person, etc can force us to pay for their exclusive content when they support the flash player. This includes, video playback, apps, etc. As a developer flash enables me to write an application only once that can work online or offline, interface with the OS's native interfaces, and then have it available on Mac, Windows, Linux, Android, etc and thats a lot more potential customers than just the iphone/ipad. And a hell of a lot cheaper for me to develop my apps when I don't have to make a separate one for each platform. Plus I've got control of my application distribution then not Steve Jobs/Apple.

Re:This is why Flash must die.

[Anonymous Coward]

wether or not an FOSS player works with hulu and YouTube has NOTHING to do with the FACT that it IS a published and open file format standard.
 
  http://www.openscreenproject.org/

Just because you are buying into the HTML 5 hype, and apparently don't like flash, does not mean it is not an open standard.

Whoever modded you up also has a flaw in their logic processing.

Re:This is why Flash must die.

[pjt33]

The latest plugins (1.6.0_17 and later) are supposed to be better in this regard.

Re:This is why Flash must die.

[mldi]

OK, as a web developer, my vote is that Flash isn't the big bad giant evil tentacle rape monster everyone makes it out to be.

Honestly? It sure as hell does a LOT of things better than an HTML5/JS implementation.

Why I say this? Watch your CPU cycles next time. It's asinine.

Re:This is why Flash must die.

[Zephiris]

An issue with the default settings/software (which is almost never 'upstream' default settings/software), as has cropped up on Ubuntu and OpenSuSE many times over the years, is much more likely than random, sudden, otherwise asymptomatic hardware failure.

Sometimes if you're just doing everything right, some guy who thinks he's a real genius programmer has added a bizarre, buggy, dubious patch to glibc or the distro's kernel which causes problems for some software for some users (at best).

Re:This is why Flash must die.

[LWATCDR]

The fact that parts of FLASH are not published shows that it isn't a completely open standard.
Say what want but if you can not write a FOSS player that will play everything it isn't open.

Even you will not post without being an AC because you know your full of it.

Re:This is why Flash must die.

[LWATCDR]

Flash as an idea isn't bad.
Flash as a only sorta open system is terrible.
The fact that it is IMPOSSIBLE to write a FOSS flash player that will play 100 of the flash content on the market means it is a not an open standard no matter what Adobe or anyone says.
I don't own apple products outside of an iPod touch that I use to listen to podcasts with.
My cell phone is an Android Samsung Moment and my PCs run Windows and Linux.

But Flash isn't an open standard it is as simple as that.
And I still do not have Flash for my mobile phone. And my wife still doesn't have Flash for her Palm Pre.

Committed

[Enderandrew]

By committed, we mean not really committed at all.

We know that Silverlight is suppoting 64-bit. We know that Microsoft has been pushing 64-bit since 2003. We know all new Windows 7 PCs are coming 64-bit. And we will continue to keep our heads in the sand.

Thanks for your continued patronage.

Re:Committed

[VGPowerlord]

We know that Silverlight is suppoting 64-bit. We know that Microsoft has been pushing 64-bit since 2003. We know all new Windows 7 PCs are coming 64-bit. And we will continue to keep our heads in the sand.

You are aware that the default browser in 64-bit Windows is 32-bit Internet Explorer?

Re:Committed

[Anonymous Coward]

Want to know why?
It's because many plugins, such as Flash, don't come in 64-bit flavors.

Re:Committed

[squizzar]

Not to mention VS2010 - which is depressingly slow on my x64 Windows 7 machine. I thought there was already some way of running 32 bit Firefox with 32 bit flash on 64 bit linux? That's basically Microsoft's 'Solution'

Re:Committed

[Anonymous Coward]

We know that Silverlight is suppoting 64-bit....

Silverlight doesn't support 64-bit yet.

Re:Committed

[Orestesx]

Exactly. 64 Bit flash is not needed on Windows as long as the 32 bit browsers are supported. 64 bit flash isn't needed for Linux either, if you are willing to run a 32 bit browser. The only problem is that the default browser on most (all?) 64 bit GNU/Linux distributions is 64 bit.

Re:Committed

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh heh heh! Oh, boy! PENIS DENIS!

Re:Committed

[Anonymous Coward]

as a dotnet developer myself i am amazed by the retardness of people who think silverlight is a good platform.

yay lets lock us into a new api which doesnt give us anything new business wise, altough i love being locked in and only targetting the windows platform!

 

Re:Committed

[Enderandrew]

Microsoft has been working hand-in-hand with Moonlight developers so they can produce a GPL Silverlight player for Linux.

Microsoft also puts out development tools for Silverlight on Mac, and an official Mac plug-in.

You aren't being locked into the Windows platform with it.

Re:Committed

[Waffle Iron]

Another reason: You don't need a 64-bit address space to run a web browser.

Re:Committed

[Wrath0fb0b]

We know that Silverlight is suppoting 64-bit. We know that Microsoft has been pushing 64-bit since 2003. We know all new Windows 7 PCs are coming 64-bit. And we will continue to keep our heads in the sand.
 

To be fair to Microsoft (gasp, yes, even they deserve minimally that), they were planning on making Windows7 x64 only since every chip since 2006 (that was Conroe's launch, many NetBurst supported it as well but not all) supported it. Then Intel came along and released a glorified 486 called Atom which sold like hotcakes (for $40/unit, why wouldn't it -- netbooks are great in their niche) and completely screwed their plans.

The new Atoms support x86_64 and Microsoft has hinted that Windows 8 will be x64 only. Anyone with a pre-2010 (PineTrail) netbook will be SoL but the expect replacement cycle for $200 netbooks is probably less than that for $500 laptops.

Re:Committed

[0123456]

The only problem is that the default browser on most (all?) 64 bit GNU/Linux distributions is 64 bit.

And that you need to install a load of 32-bit libraries just to run a 32-bit web browser when the rest of the OS is 64-bit. I'd rather dump Flash (which I only ever use to watch Youtube videos anyway) than have huge amounts of cruft in my OS just so that it can run.

Re:Committed

[jisatsusha]

Moonlight is a joke. They're not even close to releasing v3 yet, and Microsoft already have v4 of Silverlight out. The only practical use for Moonlight most of the time is for displaying a "You need to upgrade to a newer version of Silverlight" message.

Re:Committed

[coolsnowmen]

It isn't just about addressing more than 2 or 4 GB of memory with a single program. In fact, that isn't what 64 bit means. That term "X bit" refers to the the size of the command that a CPU processes at a given per cycle. That is, the maximum registersize used for all math operations, and if done right, the fastest. So large numbers can be dealt with faster. Bench marks show that this only really speeds up computation for a few common computer programs: people doing lots of computations, databases, and audio/video compression/decompression. The later is exactly the reason that flash might do better with 64 bit.

If your post was in jest, I apologize for taking it seriously and resending so verbosely.

Re:Committed

[s73v3r]

You're still just as locked into Microsoft as you were into Adobe when you used Flash. Nothing changed, except the name of the vendor you write the check out to.

Re:Committed

[Anonymous Coward]

It exists, but is sometimes quite unstable, and has strange bugs.

Re:Committed

[Enderandrew]

How is Adobe locking you into Microsoft when they have players on Linux, Mac, Android, PS3, etc?

Re:Committed

[Enderandrew]

It isn't the resource hog the way Flash is, and it doesn't crash as often as Flash.

Microsoft keeps pumping up new versions of Silverlight left and right, but many sites that have Silverlight content are still basiclly just using 2.0.

Last time I checked months ago, Moonlight had most of the 3.0 features down. I wouldn't say they are no where near to releasing it.

Silverlight 4.0 just came out the door. If Moonlight is putting out 3.0 support the second Microsoft gets 4.0 tools into developers hands, that isn't bad given how fast that platform is moving.

Re:Committed

[John Hasler]

> Then Intel came along and released a glorified 486 called Atom which sold
> like hotcakes (for $40/unit, why wouldn't it -- netbooks are great in their
> niche) and completely screwed their plans.

> The new Atoms support x86_64 and Microsoft has hinted that Windows 8 will be
> x64 only.

Why do they find this so difficult? Debian has supported 32 and 64 bit architectures for more than a decade.

Re:Committed

[protektor]

Only one small problem with Silverlight, or it might be a major problem depending on why you need Silverlight. Most of the end users I know are waiting for Moonlight on Linux to support the DRM stuff from Microsoft so they can finally watch Netflix streaming on Linux. Once that is done, or Netflix moves so something a bit more open/standardized then most users won't care as Moonlight would then be good enough.

  Netflix streaming video is the main reason, maybe the only reason, most end users care about Silverlight at all.

Re:Committed

[Waffle Iron]

Actually, the "bit size" of a CPU generally refers to its address pointer size. The 32-bit x86 has been able to deal with 64-bit chunks of integer data since the MMX was introduced in 1996, and now it does 128 bits at a time with SSE. Multimedia operations that are be done in a browser process don't usually benefit from working on big numbers, but they do benefit from crunching lots of smaller numbers at one time. That's what these SIMD extensions do, and a "64-bit" architecture isn't necessary for that.

Re:Committed

[s73v3r]

You misread me. I said, with Silverlight, you're just as locked into Microsoft as you were locked into Adobe while using Flash. I didn't say that using Adobe locked you into Microsoft (although that's practically true, as Windows is the only platform Flash runs worth a damn on).

Re:Committed

[Sancho]

You don't need a 64-bit address space to run much of anything. Very few applications really need it. So what's the point of going 64-bit at all? For the handful of people who will actually benefit from the capabilities?

At this point, you're talking about targeting the same (or lower) market share as Linux on the desktop holds.

Re:Committed

[Anonymous Coward]

Given that some people claim the 32-bit address space is too limited for ASLR to be really effective, a 64 bit browser might soon make a lot of sense for security reasons (plus it is AFAIK not possible to compile 64 bit libraries that do not support NX or ASLR, thus moving to 64 bit also enforces minimum security standards - of course browsers just shouldn't load such security nightmares on 32 bit either, but that's a bit more difficult).

Re:Committed

[Enderandrew]

I disagree.

Flash runs like shit on every platform.

Re:Committed

[coolsnowmen]

And 32 bit processors have been able to address greater than 32bits of memory since PAE introduction at the same time.

Your nitpick of "address pointer size" is simply wrong not as correct as my definition. The instruction set determines which bits are the "address pointers" and which bits go to other operations or operator designators. whether is is 32bit or 64bit is lower level than that.

Re:Committed

[Waffle Iron]

Whatever. If you can find a popular "64-bit architecture" that only supports 32-bit pointers, feel free to point it out.

My point was: browsers do not need either 64-bit address pointers nor 64-bit integers for performance. They can already operate on 128 bits of data (split into several smaller numbers) per clock cycle on today's commodity 32-bit processors to do multimedia processing and graphics. The rest of what they do is mainly string processing and compiling, both of which run just fine in 32-bit mode.

Re:Committed

[Yaztromo]

Multimedia operations that are be done in a browser process don't usually benefit from working on big numbers, but they do benefit from crunching lots of smaller numbers at one time. That's what these SIMD extensions do, and a "64-bit" architecture isn't necessary for that.

No, but on Intel architectures they do benefit from the fact that in x64 mode, you have twice as many general purpose registers on chip. More registers means that more data can be kept in the CPU at once, reducing cache hits and speeding up all computation.

64-bit compilers for x64 processors can thus better plan register layout. This can make a noticeable difference for all 64-bit applications (beyond the most trivial cases that wouldn't need to use more than 8 general purpose registers in the first place).

Note that this isn't an intrinsic benefit to 64-bit computing, but more a benefit of 64 bit computing on Intel-based architectures, which have traditionally been low on general purpose registers. PowerPC systems, for example, don't benefit from running most apps in 64-bit mode, because the register count between 32 bit and 64 bit is identical (32 GPR, 32 FPR). x64 was a sufficient compatibility break that it was deemed possible to add more registers in this mode (although IMO, they didn't go quite far enough).

Yaz.

Re:Committed

[Anonymous Coward]

Opera 9.5 and above comes with a 32bit wrapper, so you can use a 64bit Opera with 32bit flash.

Re:Committed

[spongman]

indeed, 64-bit pointers are 2x the size (duh), and that size increase can lead to more page faults. more page faults can easily nullify any advantage gained by having more integer registers. oh yeah, those registers need to be pushed onto the stack, too - more page faults.

64-bit address spaces are great for things that need, or can use, large address spaces (like operating systems and databases), but most everything else is fine with 32-bit.

Re:Committed

[spongman]

it's not just that 'many' plugins aren't 32-bit. it's that not all plugins are 64-bit. MS won't make that switch until pretty much every plugin is available in 64-bit - it's just not worth the support calls. 32-bit is fine for ~99.9% of the cases, and for the others, the user is probably sufficiently knowledgeable to know where to find the 64-bit version.

Re:Committed

[spongman]

-1: Pedant

Re:Committed

[makomk]

Whatever. If you can find a popular "64-bit architecture" that only supports 32-bit pointers, feel free to point it out.

Except, of course, that it's the other way around. There are 32-bit architectures that support bigger than 32-bit pointers, and lots of 16-bit architectures that support bigger than 16-bit pointers. As for 8-bit architectures, pretty much all of them use a pointer size bigger than 8 bits. Normally, the number of bits refers to some combination of the memory data bus size, the register size of the normal non-SIMD integer registers, and the size of integer arithmetic operands.

Re:Committed

[drinkypoo]

At this point, you're talking about targeting the same (or lower) market share as Linux on the desktop holds.

Since you mention Linux, it's also fair to mention that the 64 bit flash 10 plugin on Linux provides dramatically better performance than the 32 bit version. Which is why I'm using it right now.

Re:Committed

[drinkypoo]

Actually, the "bit size" of a CPU generally refers to its address pointer size.

No, the "bit size" of a CPU generally refers to the size of data that the processor can operate on in a single instruction. MMX and related instructions are handled by a coprocessor.

Multimedia operations that are be done in a browser process don't usually benefit from working on big numbers, but they do benefit from crunching lots of smaller numbers at one time. That's what these SIMD extensions do, and a "64-bit" architecture isn't necessary for that.

String handling works twice as fast on 64 bit architectures as on 32 bit ones, much of what computers do is string handling, virtually everything that a web browser does besides display images or run plugins, likewise. Most programs see a 10% improvement simply by being recompiled for x64 as compared to x32, due in part to new instructions and in part to a lack of register starvation.

There is no sense to having 32 bit components to a 64 bit OS, unless they are necessary for the support of 32 bit applications. The ONLY drawback is increased memory use, and that does not always happen!

Re:Committed

[Waffle Iron]

MMX and related instructions are handled by a coprocessor.

Look at modern CPU architecture diagrams. The media units are no more of a coprocessor than any other functional unit. In particular, the instructions are decoded and run in the same pipelines as everything else. But I suppose if you choose to define any data path that doesn't match the pointer size as a "coprocessor", then we're both right.

String handling works twice as fast on 64 bit architectures as on 32 bit ones,

I think that assertion is totally false. One of the biggest bottlenecks on performance of modern CPUs on this kind of workload is accurate branch prediction, which bit size does almost nothing to help. Just block moving strings around is not an issue, and even if it were, newer 32-bit X86 processors have special tricks using a specially crafted REP MOVSD operations that can move entire cache lines in one clock.

There is no sense to having 32 bit components to a 64 bit OS, unless they are necessary for the support of 32 bit applications.

But you're not looking at it from the standpoint of a software vendor, who are the ones who actually provide the components. They have to release the 32-bit code anyway for the foreseeable future, and managing two separate releases is a lot more work for them in return for the single-digit performance increases from lower register pressure. Users most likely don't perceive such small performance increments, so a 64-bit release gets dropped in favor of more crucial work.

Footcannon: aim, fire, reload ...

[AliasMarlowe]

Oh well, it looks like Adobe wants us 64bit Linux users to focus on H.264, which is really great with hardware acceleration in the graphics card. Uh, wait a minute...

Re:Footcannon: aim, fire, reload ...

[rumith]

Google recently began shipping Chrome with Flash preinstalled. I wonder if they'll pull the plug as well?

Re:Footcannon: aim, fire, reload ...

[TobascoKid]

The 64 bit version of Chrome never shipped with flash.

Re:Footcannon: aim, fire, reload ...

[mldi]

Google recently began shipping Chrome with Flash preinstalled. I wonder if they'll pull the plug as well?

If you've ever taken a look at which Flash lib they're using, it's the 32-bit one with the 64-bit wrapper.

Adobe has one target market:

[0100010001010011]

Windows devices.

Is it any wonder that how good Flash for OS X is, Steve banned them from the iP* devices? I don't know how Flash runs on Linux, but on my Mac more than 1-2 youpo^H^H tube videos up in tabs and my fans are maxed out.

Someone in the Linux community needs to step up tell Adobe to shove it like Apple did and start working towards an HTML5 future.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend?

Re:Adobe has one target market:

[LWATCDR]

Exactly. Adobe will support what ever platforms make the most money for Adobe.
That is why they want to be on the iPhone so bad.
But they will always be in control. We must have an open standard for this and now.

Re:Adobe has one target market:

[iainl]

No, let's be accurate here.

32-bit Windows devices.

Because despite even my little Acer netbook running 64-bit IE, I have to drop to the 32-bit version to see Flash.

Re:Adobe has one target market:

[farble1670]

adobe is one of few major software vendors that has consistently kept their software suite going on mac, even through the bad times.

Re:Adobe has one target market:

[russotto]

adobe is one of few major software vendors that has consistently kept their software suite going on mac, even through the bad times.

IIRC, they considered abandoning the Mac back in the non-Jobs era, but the wailing from their customer base reached even their ears. Had they done so they might have managed to destroy Apple.

Re:Adobe has one target market:

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, I'm officially banning Flash from the official Linux App store. Now developers will have no choice but not use it, as there is only one Linux distribution that has only one way of installing applications.

Re:Adobe has one target market:

[Khuffie]

Apple only recently provided 3rd party API access to hardware acceleration for video in Mac OS X 10.6.3. Six days later, Adobe released a beta preview of Flash Player 10.1 with hardware acceleration for video. So really, is it Adobe's fault? Or is it Apple's fault for locking down their OS and access go important APIs? http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/28/flash-player-gala-brings-hardware-decoding-support-to-mac-os-x/

Re:Adobe has one target market:

[Anonymous Coward]

adobe is one of few major software vendors that has consistently kept their software suite going on mac, even through the bad times.

IIRC, they considered abandoning the Mac back in the non-Jobs era, but the wailing from their customer base reached even their ears. Had they done so they might have managed to destroy Apple.

And after all that, Stevie cheerfully iBackstabbed them with the iPhone. Aren't business automatons so cute when they pretend they have real emotions?

Re:Adobe has one target market:

[jerdo]

Adobe only recently stopped using APIs from Mac OS 9 (CS 5), it only took them 10 years to start using only APIs from the new OS, you want to blame Apple for that too? Adobe doesn't play well with anyone, why would you even consider supporting them?

Re:Adobe has one target market:

[Khuffie]

Why stop using an API if it's still available and it still works? If Apple has kept them open, they're open for a reason.

And hey, if you want to go down that road, Apple recently criticized Adobe for being late to the game porting their apps to Cocoa. Guess who makes iTunes, which is still stuck in Carbon land?

Re:Adobe has one target market:

[s73v3r]

Bullshit. That's the low level API. Since 10.4 or so, Apple released CoreVideo, which provided video playback, and used hardware acceleration if available. Adobe just didn't want to use the high level API.

Re:Adobe has one target market:

[Binary Boy]

Flash Player on OSX has sucked since long before the iPhone, though it has gotten significantly better in that time.

Re:Adobe has one target market:

[Khuffie]

That's because the CoreVideo API didn't allow to read back the rendered pixels, which the Flash Player kind of requires to be able to put overlays (with transparencies) if needed over the video. You really think Adobe didn't use an API because they "didn't want to"?

Re:Adobe has one target market:

[toriver]

Tell that to Premiere users. Hear the manic laughter.

Re:Adobe has one target market:

[Tubal-Cain]

Why stop using an API if it's still available and it still works?

Is it deprecated yet? If so, isn't using it a form of planned obsolescence?

Re:Adobe has one target market:

[Anonymous Coward]

Had they done so they might have managed to destroy Apple.

And now Apple is putting the last nail in their coffin. While they're not dead yet. How (un)poetic.

Re:Adobe has one target market:

[Hurricane78]

The enemy of my enemy is still my enemy. :P

Re:Adobe has one target market:

[drinkypoo]

IIRC, they considered abandoning the Mac back in the non-Jobs era, but the wailing from their customer base reached even their ears. Had they done so they might have managed to destroy Apple.

Since they haven't done so, they're creating an opening for Apple to buy them. Apple's control over Adobe's well-being may shake investor confidence. People are pirating Adobe products less because there are free alternatives available (Inkscape, Scribus, GIMP) which can handle the majority of use cases, though there are notable exceptions. Pirating them less means being less familiar with them. Apple used to know this but forgot it which is why the educational discounts became a joke and many Apple presences in schools disappeared even before Apple's stores opened. Microsoft understands this which is why they make it so cheap for schools to give students a windows license. Not just schools, either; an IEEE "PC Club" membership (cheap on top of an IEEE membership) also gives you a bunch of Microsoft licenses.

Not losing much...

[ProdigyPuNk]

I've only ever used 32bit versions of Flash on Linux, and even those have tons of bugs (or just plain don't work). I can only imagine what the 64bit version is like. I really doubt that it worked any better - Flash on Linux sucks, in general, and whatever makes it die quicker is okay with me.

Re:Not losing much...

[chicagoan]

The 64bit version of flash on linux was much better for me than the 32bit version running through ndiswrapper. The plugin used to crash for me all the time when wrapped but ever since the 64bit version came out crashes are rare. When I go full screen on say you tube it does get a bit choppy very easily but I'll take that over crashes.

Re:Not losing much...

[Austerity Empowers]

Works fine near as I can tell.

Re:Not losing much...

[Djoulihen]

Even though the 64-bit linux version was an alpha release, it worked rather well and was definitely a serious alternative to using the 32-but version along with nspluginwrapper. I have been using it for some time without any major problem. Fullscreen video playing still sucks, but huh, we're talking about flash right ?

Re:Not losing much...

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe it crashed because you were trying to run a browser plugin through a network driver wrapper. Or did you mean nspluginwrapper?

Re:Not losing much...

[chicagoan]

Lol, yes nspluginwrapper. See its been so very long since I've had to use it that I forget its name.

Re:Not losing much...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are you using flash for full screen video?? Any other player won't be choppy.

Re:Not losing much...

[Anonymous Coward]

The only problem I've ever had with 64-bit Flash on Linux is randomly losing the ability to click.

Re:Not losing much...

[chicagoan]

What are my options for youtube, hulu, cough, cough, porn etc.? Most sites these days use flash and even youtube + html5 will not do full screen.

Re:Not losing much...

[hufter]

Since I Upgraded my 64 bit Linux Mint to 9 (Isadora), it seems that, for the first time, Flash is working fine. No more "buttons don't work" or occasional freezes. It's just as horrible CPU hog on videos as before, but works (I have enough CPU power if I close all other CPU hogs). Just checked, Flash is 64-bit version 10.0.45.2-mint1.

Certainly do not want to go back to ndiswrapper.

Re:Not losing much...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm randomly losing the ability to click with 32-bit flash. If you can't do a successful left click, try right-left-left in rapid succession, it does help me sometimes. For the second click, don't click on the pop-up menu, click nearby. Of course you cannot play games with this method.

Re:Not losing much...

[Tubal-Cain]

I prefer to download video files and play them from VLC. Browser cache, youtube-dl, wget, etc. Haven't been able to get Hulu, though.

Re:Not losing much...

[mldi]

Always worked fine for me. I used the 64-bit version for a damn good reason. Jesus Christ this sucks.

Probably incompetent coders

[Anonymous Coward]

A "size_t" is NOT the same as an "unsigned int".

If you think it is, you're ignorant.

Re:Probably incompetent coders

[0123456]

A "size_t" is NOT the same as an "unsigned int".

If you think it is, you're ignorant.

But 64-bit Flash has been working fine in 10.0; they've only dropped it now they've switched to 10.1, implying that they've actively broken something that used to work.

Re:Probably incompetent coders

[gangien]

nothing like wild unfounded accusations! lol

or maybe i missed something.

Not a problem

[WindBourne]

I think that HTML5 is going to come on REAL strong.

some things are broken for me

[chickenrob]

I can get my webcam to work with this workaround

  http://wdawe.com/index.php/adobe-breaks-flash-for-linux-webcam-and?blog=1

However no with no microphone this is no fun. (tested on stickam and ustream)

Unfortunately yoville and farmville are working nicely (though they crash with a right click.

 

Doesn't work anyway

[dandart]

Half the time Flash is buggy, especially on 64-bit. They should fix it before releasing at all. It's a good thing that this is not available because it'll encourage people to use proper, open formats, and not closed, proprietary, barely-known-about-by-half-the-population formats, without having to subject these poor desktop users with something that doesn't have proper mic and webcam support half the time. What would we use Flash for anyway now? Not videos, that's for sure. WebM's going all the way up. This is the reason BIbud and Apple too don't use Flash, because there are much better options available, for nothing, and properly free. WebM is supported in nightly builds of most popular browsers and supported on YouTube as well. Watch out for WebM support in Bibud!

Re:Doesn't work anyway

[What the Frag]

Hm, the 64-bit version works much better and mostly stable for me while the 32-bit + ndiswrapper crashes on firefox every few flash sites.

It's a pity. 32-bit is not an option anymore. On all my workstations I need 4-8 GB memory and a 64 bit system is your obvious choice.

The current options for me is is either to live with having 25+ code execution vulnerabilities, get the crashing 32 bit version or delete it completely. I don't like any of the options.. Thank you Adobe.

Re:Doesn't work anyway

[dandart]

Disappointed. Very disappointed. Have you tried running 32bit FF with that?

Alternatively.... Gnash and SWFDec work on Youtube at least, but you can always use HTML5 mode for that.

Tried out Chrome with that?

Do you want fries with that?

Re:Doesn't work anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

And your non-obvious choice is PAE.

Re:Doesn't work anyway

[tepples]

Among 32-bit Windows operating systems, only server versions use PAE because drivers for desktop peripherals tend not to support PAE.

Re:Doesn't work anyway

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but PAE works just fine under OS X and Linux.

Re:Doesn't work anyway

[What the Frag]

Oh yeah yeah right.

I remember trying to install my nvidia graphics driver. "Your kernel is not supported. Please install the generic kernel"

Re:Doesn't work anyway

[dbIII]

Bullshit - the only x86 32 bit operating systems left that do not support the pentium II and later are the Microsoft products aimed at the home and small business. Please do not pretend a business decision made to cut costs within a single software company is a hardware restriction.

I wonder what openSUSE will do

[IBBoard]

openSUSE has an RPM that pulls in Flash, because they're not allowed to redistribute it directly. What it mainly seems to do is show an EULA and then download and install Flash. I know I've had a couple of updates to it, so it'll be interesting to see what happens if the 10.1 Flash site is disabled.

Oh well, I guess I can manage without Flash. It's not as if the occasional YouTube video is a big loss.

Re:I wonder what openSUSE will do

[Anonymous Coward]

youtube supports html5

Re:I wonder what openSUSE will do

[G Money]

I don't think they ever used the 64 bit version of flash, they just pulled in the 32 bit version so this shouldn't affect OpenSUSE at all. They always used nsplugginwrapper before for flash on x86_64 (although maybe they've changed this lately).

Re:I wonder what openSUSE will do

[IBBoard]

I assumed it was a 64-bit package, but maybe it was just 32-bit all nspluginwrapper'd up.

Re:I wonder what openSUSE will do

[Anssi55]

openSUSE has an RPM that pulls in Flash, because they're not allowed to redistribute it directly.

Are you sure? I see a 6 megabyte rpm there, quite large for a simple download wrapper:
http://download.opensuse.org/factory/repo/non-oss/suse/i586/

Flash itself supports H.264

[tepples]

Oh well, it looks like Adobe wants us 64bit Linux users to focus on H.264

An SWF can load and play H.264 video, in addition to H.263 and VP6.

Re:Flash itself supports H.264

[joe_cot]

====* -- Joke

    O
    \|/ --- You
    / \

His point was that the big feature for 10.1 was hardware acceleration for flash (and therefore h264), which Linux doesn't get. Linux gets nothing but downsides from this.

Re:Flash itself supports H.264

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but it doesn't utilize hardware decoding, so it's CPU meltdown time.

Re:Flash itself supports H.264

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is gpp stick figure covering his crotch? BTW, this is me:

---> Cool Breeze --->

      \O/$
      | --- Me holding the dough.
      / \

Re:Flash itself supports H.264

[Anonymous Coward]

Except for the security holes that are only fixed in 10.1+. Running the old 10 is dangerous.

Like in a Kafka novel...

[Kidbro]

Welcome to the Flash Player 10.1 Forum
Important: Do not use this forum to discuss the Flash Player 10 64-bit Linux prerelease or Flash Player 10 and earlier release players. Follow these links to discuss these topics:
Flash Player 10 for 64-bit Linux forum

Flash Player 10 for 64-bit Linux (Read Only)
Welcome to the Flash Player 10 for 64-bit Linux Forum

I'm not sure whether I should laugh or cry... but it reminds me of reading The Trial :)

Re:Like in a Kafka novel...

[raddan]

I'm pretty sure that any sufficiently large organization, say, one that has more than 20 members, behaves pathological. Humans don't agree by nature, but it's easier to keep the message coherent when you only need to knock a few heads together.

Re:Like in a Kafka novel...

[bill_mcgonigle]

Hey, you've got it easy. I made a polite request on the forum and they shut it down!

Pretty soon Flash for 64-bit linux will be the new Duke Nukem meme around here.

Dynamic recompilation

[tepples]

Flash Player works by recompiling ActionScript into native code. What JIT compiler 1. automatically adjusts to the architecture it's compiled for and 2. was available when Flash Player 10 development started (LLVM wasn't)?

Re:Dynamic recompilation

[Anonymous Coward]

Flash Player works by recompiling ActionScript into native code. What JIT compiler 1. automatically adjusts to the architecture it's compiled for and 2. was available when Flash Player 10 development started (LLVM wasn't)?

If it's that easy, why is Adobe punting it?

Re:Dynamic recompilation

[FranTaylor]

Those are "excuses", not reasons. We are talking about Adobe, a large software company that can actually write software. They are supposed to fix things like this BEFORE stepping out onto a new platform.

Re:Dynamic recompilation

[mick232]

Any Java VM that has been around for at least five or so years?

Re:Dynamic recompilation

[tepples]

Any Java VM that has been around for at least five or so years?

JIT JVMs also need to be ported to individual architectures. As I understand it, if you compile OpenJDK for an unsupported architecture, you'll get the interpreter, not the JIT compiler. If you're claiming that Adobe should just adopt the JVM, consider that ActionScript is not Java. It's much closer to JavaScript, which is also not Java. So are you talking about recompiling ActionScript to Java bytecode and then using a JVM to run that?

Re:Dynamic recompilation

[Anonymous Coward]

We are talking about Adobe, a large software company that can actually write software.

Objection, your honor! Historical evidence disproves this assertion!

Re:Dynamic recompilation

[mick232]

No. I was merely pointing out that the Java JIT compiler generates optimized code for the platform the program is executed on. Even if it is the same architecture the JIT compiler can decide if e.g. MMX or SSE is available or not and emit suitable instructions.

Re:Dynamic recompilation

[tepples]

I was merely pointing out that the Java JIT compiler generates optimized code for the platform the program is executed on.

But a JIT compiler still has to be rewritten for each instruction set. In some ways, x86-64 is almost as different from x86 as they are from ARM. Even if Oracle's Java unit has the resources to do this in a timely manner, Adobe might not.

Re:Dynamic recompilation

[mick232]

That must have been clear to Adobe when they introduced the concept. I don't see a way for any compiler (JIT or other) to automagically support a new instruction set. If Adobe does not have the resources to offer their JIT compiler for all the main platforms out there (ideally any platform), they can't expect the world to use their stuff.

Re:Dynamic recompilation

[Anonymous Coward]

...that can actually write software?

that's funny because FLASH SUCKS

Re:Dynamic recompilation

[Bryan K. Feir]

Yeah, well, originally they bought Flash from Macromedia, remember...

Adobe couldn't pull

[Stumbles]

their head out of their ass if they used the worlds largest crane; http://www.dlog.com/fileadmin/user_upload/UEber_uns/Presse/mobil_kran_2_20cm.jpg

Re:Adobe couldn't pull

[Anonymous Coward]

+5 Informative

Beta closed, not flash

[Aladrin]

The beta is closed, but that doesn't mean Flash 10.1 isn't available for Linux. You can still download it from their site. The closure of the beta could mean anything from 'we're not going to do it' to 'we really messed up and we're writing it from scratch'.

Flash 10 had been working a LOT better than previous versions for me, so at least we aren't stuck with the old flash 7 or 8 crap.

Re:Beta closed, not flash

[makomk]

Except the 64-bit beta version almost certainly has a remote code execution vulnerability that's unlikely to ever be fixed now there's no new releases. In fact, it looks like not wanting to put in the effort to fix it is why they terminated the program, judging from the timing.

Re:Beta closed, not flash

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think you need to worry about someone slipping a .exe file past flash to run on your 64 bit linux.

Re:Beta closed, not flash

[John Hasler]

> Flash 10 had been working a LOT better than previous versions for me...

That's the explanation, then. The quality got out of control and exceeded their standards. Nothing to do but kill it.

Poor Adobe...

[gentlemen_loser]

A few days ago, there was a discussion here about how evil Apple was for trying to kill Flash. I said then, and will repeat here: Fuck you Adobe.

They took their sweet time porting their "cross platform" plugin to Linux, and in the meantime, we were stuck with the barely functioning (although I do not fault them for the effort) GNU implementation. Cross platform to Adobe means: Windows 7, Windows Vitsa, Windows XP, and Mac OS. Personally, I pine for the day that HTML 5 is able to displace Flash, and therefore Adobe, permanently. In my opinion, they have squandered any goodwill towards the open source community. I'll be the first one in line to dance on their grave.

Re:Poor Adobe...

[Anonymous Coward]

My sentiment exactly.

Re:Poor Adobe...

[pandrijeczko]

We're currently at a transition point in mobile communications.

Go back a couple of years and most people were accessing the Internet on desktop and portable computers running Windows, Linux and OS X. Now it's all about portable devices and already Apple's portable devices cannot and will not support Flash.

I don't see Microsoft being displaced from home and office desktops any time soon but they are certainly not making any great progress in getting an embedded or slimmed-down Windows onto portable devices - it's more likely the case that the only option they have is to wait for a time when portable devices have enough capacity and power to efficiently run a slightly slimmed-down version of Windows, by which time they will already be competing with Android and the other web OSes that are out there.

I'm mostly Linux user and although I've not seen too many issues with 64-bit Flash so far, Adobe's support of it sucks which ultimately means something else, more than likely HTML 5, will gain more ground on them and start pushing them out.

It really won't surprise me to see, in about 18 months time, Adobe releasing at least some of the source to Flash as they desperately try to hold onto their market share and to try and encourage the Open Source community to continue using Flash.

Re:Poor Adobe...

[Anonymous Coward]

A few days ago, there was a discussion here about how evil Apple was for trying to kill Flash. I said then, and will repeat here: Fuck you Adobe.

They took their sweet time porting their "cross platform" plugin to Linux, and in the meantime, we were stuck with the barely functioning (although I do not fault them for the effort) GNU implementation. Cross platform to Adobe means: Windows 7, Windows Vitsa, Windows XP, and Mac OS. Personally, I pine for the day that HTML 5 is able to displace Flash, and therefore Adobe, permanently. In my opinion, they have squandered any goodwill towards the open source community. I'll be the first one in line to dance on their grave.

Dance hell.

I already have a case of Coors Light cooling in the fridge.

Yes, Coors Light.

Because there isn't a beer in the entire universe that generates larger quantities of piss than Coors Light. And if I'm lucky I'll wake up the next day with a really bad case of beer shits.

Re:Poor Adobe...

[JackDW]

Disagree. Adobe's work in porting Flash to Linux has made the Linux browsing experience as similar to the Windows one as we would ever wish it to be. Adobe has made Linux more usable, because most websites now "just work" on Linux, even when they rely on Flash.

Linux users such as myself (13+ years of desktop use) cannot expect the rest of the world to give up Flash just because it's a non-free application. Someday, HTML5 and Javascript may be so much better than Flash that the switchover occurs naturally, like the transition from IE to Firefox. Until then, there will be lots of Flash, and we cannot get around that by evangelising about how nobody should use Flash because although it's free, it isn't Free. Most people do not care about this ideological distinction. They just want things to work. If Youtube and Facebook games don't work, then they assume Linux is at fault.

And you know, sometimes it is a problem with Linux. The very worst thing we can be doing is making technical decisions that deliberately make life difficult for Adobe (and other commercial software vendors). Like the decision not to make a 32-bit web browser the default in 64-bit Linux distributions, when 32-bit browsers are always the default on Windows and Mac, the 32-bit compatibility libraries are useful for other things too, and there's no reason why a browser needs to be 64-bit anyway. Or things like this:

The issue between Flash, Alsa and Pulse is a known one that seems to be mostly located in Flash, and hence is rather difficult for anyone except Adobe to resolve :\. Ironically it's actually part of the reason why many distros are adopting Pulse: we figure if everyone is using Pulse and complaining when Flash audio breaks, it'll pile on the pressure on Adobe to do something about it...

Reading stuff like this is just amazing. Reminds me of the old saying attributed to Microsoft, "DOS ain't done till Lotus won't run". If a software vendor isn't doing things your way, then break the APIs until the vendor complies or (more likely) just gives up in disgust.

Re:Poor Adobe...

[nine-times]

Cross platform to Adobe means: Windows 7, Windows Vitsa, Windows XP, and Mac OS.

For their CS suite, yes. For the Flash player, MacOS isn't *much* better off than Linux. The Flash player on OSX stinks. Not only is performance bad, but it crashes constantly.

On the bright side, Apple includes a nice quick PDF viewer, so at least you don't need to install Acrobat Reader.

Re:Poor Adobe...

[H0p313ss]

I'll be the first one in line to dance on their grave.

I think Linus already shotgunned the grave dancing back when he was struggling with youtube on his wife's Fedora install.

Linus Torvalds 2008-03-31 15:37:13 EDT

Description of problem:

youtube no workee - fedora 9 not usable for wife

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):

swfdec.x86_64 0.6.2-1.fc9
swfdec-gtk.x86_64 0.6.2-1.fc9
swfdec-mozilla.x86_64 0.6.0-1.fc9

How reproducible:

I didn't try a lot of videos, but I couldn't find a single one that actually
worked. And what's the internet without the rick-roll?

Some just show a light gray background, some give the play buttons etc, but show
only a black screen even when the red ball at the bottom moves along..

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Install current Fedora 9
2. Rick-roll!
3. No profit!

Actual results:

Some videos just show a light gray background, some give the play buttons etc,
but in the latter case show only a black screen even when the red ball at the
bottom seems to moves along..

Expected results:

Rick Astley in all his glory! People have reported that youtube videos are
supposed to work with swfdec, so I presume they have worked at some point and
have been broken recently.

Just to test that this isn't just a anti-rick-roll security feature, I also
tested some other videos, but let's face it - we do need Rick for the "Full
Internet Experience".

Additional info:

This is "high" priority because the wife will kill me if she doesn't have her
videos. And the adobe player won't install on current rawhide due to some
library issues.

"Obi-wan Kenobi, you're our only hope"

Re:Poor Adobe...

[Hurricane78]

How about I fuck your false dichotomy and fuck both Apple AND Adobe. (Fucking Microsoft is a given. For good measure. And for great justice! ;)

It's up to Adobe, let them kill Flash

[dragisha]

Why do we worry if Adobe decides to cut it's userbase? I will surely not go 32bit just because I love them and care for their market share.

Alternatives are already there, Adobe is just putting another nail in Flash's coffin by neglecting 64bit.... Pity, but we can live with it. Can they?

Re:It's up to Adobe, let them kill Flash

[mad.frog]

Yeah, cutting out that 1% or so of potential users will really crush their userbase....

(http://marketshare.hitslink.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10)

Re:It's up to Adobe, let them kill Flash

[king neckbeard]

According to your source, It's much larger than the iPhone users they are bitching about

Nessus Web Interface

[chill]

The Nessus web interface is done in flash and fairly nice. Is there an alternative for the command-line challenged?

Re:Nessus Web Interface

[Lord Ender]

You are a security analyst who is afraid of the command line? Really??

Re:Nessus Web Interface

[chill]

No, sorry. :-)

I've created some click-n-run templates that generate reports management demands on seeing. THEY are command-line challenged. My stuff is already 90% automated.

I'm confused

[Anonymous Coward]

We love flash in Apple/Android stories but hate it in Adobe stories... what about other stories?

Re:I'm confused

[Bing Tsher E]

No, you're confused. Apple and Adobe are both turds. They're just floating in different parts of the pool.

Re:I'm confused

[Anonymous Coward]

We want options. I want to be able to use it, but i don't want to not be able to use it.

64bit Linux is now like Apple!

[ebob9]

Solidarity with my iPad/iPhone brothers!

*Poors 40 on the sand*

Yeah, this sadly makes me hope other solutions to kill flash take of a bit more..

Got an Education?

[m509272]

Stupid comment, get an education. If you want to create your own Flash player you can do that. It is OPEN. Stop drinking the Apple Kool Aid without question.

http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/

http://flowplayer.org/

http://www.swift-tools.net/Flash/

http://www.swftools.com/tools-category.php?cat=968

There are also dozens of tools that create Flash apps so you are not restricted to Adobe's tools either.

Re:Got an Education?

[datapharmer]

except that the standards published are always a few versions behind and in reality none of those players will play any of the most recent content reliably. Sure, they work for some simple stuff but calling them an open alternative is hardly fair. Sure, they could be if adobe published their intentions in advance but then they would lose their advantage. Same problem with PDF on the creation end. Sure, it is open, but if you want the most recent features in acrobat from a free or even paid alternative, too bad, they haven't been published yet.

Re:Got an Education?

[Lumpy]

90% of the flash content on the web does not need any more than Flash 5-6 Honestly the bloat and crap shoveled into 8-9-10 is really not useful for the webcomic,video player wrapper, and slideshows that compromise the bulk of flash on the web.

Re:Got an Education?

[dougmc]

90% of the flash content on the web does not need any more than Flash 5-6

[citation needed]

I think youtube alone will barf on anything lower than Flash 8, and they've probably got more than 10% of the "flash content" (well, content that is displayed through flash) on the web right there.

Re:Got an Education?

[Khyber]

Hi, I do flash work now and then.

There's your citation. Flash is BLOATED and honestly I STILL USE OLDER VERSIONS for maintaining websites.

Re:Got an Education?

[coolsnowmen]

Youtube says it requires flash 8.
Hulu says it requires 10.0.22 (for the newest features including full screen and Higher Res video)

I'm willing to make up a statistic that says if your flash reader doesn't support these sites, it isn't good enough yet.

Am I happy with the state of things? No. But that IS the state of things.

Re:Got an Education?

[Anonymous Coward]

What the fuck do you want him to "cite"? Do you seriously think there are academic researchers wasting their time analyzing the percentage of Flash content could be implemented using only Flash 5 or Flash 6, and writing papers about it? Do you think industry analysts are doing the same? News for you, they aren't.

What he says is correct. Flash 5 or Flash 6 are suitable for 90% of the Flash content on the web.

If it makes you feel better, you can cite this very comment as proof to back up his claim. Maybe now you can finally jerk-off the Wikipedia-induced hard-on you've developed for "citations".

Re:Got an Education?

[s73v3r]

Except Adobe is solely in control of that "standard". Face it, Flash is about as "open" as Microsoft's Office XML format.

Re:Got an Education?

[Binary Boy]

Flash 6 was the first version of Flash to support an even remotely usable video codec, and still only supported the incredibly limited ActionScript 1.0.

You're wrong.

Re:Got an Education?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi, I do flash work now and then.

There's your citation.

Excellent citation! Your first sentence proved you're brain damaged, meaning the rest of your statement is demonstrably pointless and/or counterproductive to the discussion. Thanks! :-D

Re:Got an Education?

[Anonymous Coward]

If the above people don't have the resources to implement a specification in a timely manner, how is that the fault of anything being open?

Re:Got an Education?

[avandesande]

Sure, it is open, but if you want the most recent features in acrobat from a free or even paid alternative,

If you want the most recent features of Acrobat, you must be a very rare and special person.

Re:Got an Education?

[Xtravar]

Do any of those plugins work for the majority of Flash content on 64-bit Linux?

Re:Got an Education?

[vlueboy]

Now would be a good time to have a quote on how much of flash out there is video (i.e: youtube), versus ads.

I would be willing to bet that ads win. Just look at your average non-text ads video site with plenty of performance-sapping animations and a single "target vid" payload that you actually came to watch. I don't think I've ever seen any ad asking me to "upgrade" from XP's OEM install of flash 6. But CNN and pr0n sites nag and certain Newgrounds animations fail silently till you get flash 7 or 8. Versions 9 and 10 only provide better performance and without them only the most elitist video sites boot you out.

Re:Got an Education?

[Andy Dodd]

While Hulu may require 10.0.22 for the newest features, it requires 10.x just to work at all.

Critical components of Adobe's Flash implementation formerly used by Hulu (RTMPE) were never documented by Adobe, only a reverse engineered specification for RTMPE exists and anyone implementing that specification within the United States will get a DMCA takedown issued by Adobe.

Hulu has since moved to an even more "super-secret" undocumented protocol, most likely with Adobe's cooperation.

So no, Flash is not by any means open, when any attempt to create or distribute a fully compatible alternative within the United States will result in a DMCA takedown notice issued by Adobe.

Re:Got an Education?

[Andy Dodd]

Why don't you get an education?

Shut up until you can show me a link to a full Adobe Flash specification which includes RTMPE protocol documentation.

Shut up until you can show me ONE Flash implementation containing RTMPE support that has been written or distributed within the United States that hasn't resulted in a DMCA takedown notice from Adobe. (Gnash has never at any point been Hulu compatible.)

Flowplayer is light on the details of exactly how it is implemented, but it does not appear to be an alternative Flash client implementation. In fact it appears to depend on a Flash implementation being present on the client side.

Nearly all of the tools linked in that swftools link require Adobe's flash implementation to also be present on the client side, they are add-ons for it, NOT replacements. For example, the Eltima Flash'In'App is NOT a Flash reimplementation, but just a method for embedding Flash 8 or above into standalone apps. Flash 8 or above must still be present on the user's machine. From the site: "Your users will need at least Mac OS X 10.4 or later and Flash Player 8 or newer to run applications that you develop with Flash'In'App. Note: transparency will only work correctly on Intel-based Macs (sorry, it's not our limitation, but Adobe's one)."

It appears, to me, that you are the one drinking Adobe's "we have documented Flash sufficiently for alternative implementations" Kool-Aid.

Re:Got an Education?

[LWATCDR]

Do any of them support 100 of Flash 10?
Gash supports Only Flash 7 with parts of 8 and 9.
Flowplayer is only a video player.
Swift tools also seems to be only a video player.

So no even the GNU project can not seem to produce a FOSS Flash player with support for even version 9 of flash much less version 10!
Stop drinking Adobe's cool-aid. I don't even own a mac or an iphone but Adobe has seemed to have dropped 10.1 Linux 64 support.
That is the risk of letting a single company any single company control a "standard"

Re:Got an Education?

[LWATCDR]

How about this.
YouTube requires Flash 8
Hulu requires Flash 10
I will bet that CNN needs better than 6 but I have not tested it.
If those don't work then you are fubar.
Nothing wrong with asking for something to backup some bonehead statement like 90 of the web only needs Flash 5 or Flash 6!
Even that statement doesn't really fly from the start. Does 90% of the web need Flash 6?
Because if it works on 6 it should work on 5!

Re:Got an Education?

[LWATCDR]

Play Hulu on any of those.... I am waiting....

Re:Got an Education?

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot one. Lightspark.

        * JIT compilation of ActionScript to native x86 bytecode using LLVM
        * Hardware accelerated rendering using OpenGL Shaders (GLSL)
        * Very good and robust support for current-generation ActionScript 3
        * A new, clean, codebase exploiting multithreading and optimized for modern hardware. Designed from scratch after the official Flash documentation was released.

http://lightspark.sourceforge.net/

Re:Got an Education?

[Anonymous Coward]

the "flash alternatives such as gnash, fwftools and others don't even come close in compatibility to Adobe's Flash player. I know because I've tried them.

Re:Got an Education?

[soppsa]

Lol stop drinking the Apple cool aid? Stop drinking the Adobe cool aid.

Re:Got an Education?

[Anonymous Coward]

Except for one BIG problem; Adobe nicely gave the Flash programmers direct access to the Flash runtime's reported version number, enabling Flash programmers to block versions that are considered too low to handle content. Then they went and set the default on the Flash creator to the maximum version installed on the user's computer at that time; meaning, the vast majority of Flash content out there is set to reject anything that isn't Flash 10, even if they don't use any features from 10, 9, 8, etc...

Just installed 64bit Ubuntu on an older HP Laptop

[quax]

On this Celeron based machine Flash is unwatchable with 32bit Linux as well as 64bit. HTML5 streamed video on the other hand, when watched with a beta Chrome build that supports it ,gives me a passable viewing experience (although you still get immediate frame-dragging if the machine has any additional load).

More than video

[Urban Garlic]

The problem I have with this is that, in my organizaiton, Flash is actually used for some of the administrative web services within the company. Many of my users (including me!) only have one computer, and it's a 64-bit Linux workstation. We also have a security rule that says we're supposed to patch vulnerabilities, and if a patch is not availble for a known-vulnerable application, we're supposed to remove it.

So all these rules interact and add up to "some users can no longer use some administrative web services."

What with all the IE-only intranet crap, and various other hoops I've had to jump through over the years, I've been wondering for a while if the solution is to just give the affected users sandboxed Windows VMs. Then central IT (which does our Windows support) can figure out how to patch them when they're only up for an unpredictable ten minutes every couple of days...

Re:More than video

[Shados]

Why not just host a browser on a Windows box and serve the applications through Citrix? (It works not unlike X remotely, where the end user experience is roughly like if the application was running locally). Thats what we did at my previous company when stuff was incompatible with user workstations.

Re:More than video

[Khyber]

Because Citrix is a slow piece of shit. Having had to deal with it at Solectron, Kroger's, and other places, I've learned to stay FAR the hell away from that piece of garbage.

Re:More than video

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you can either install a 32-bit browser with the 32-bit Flash plugin, or use nspluginwrapper to use the 32-bit Flash plugin with a 64-bit browser.

It is a bit stupid to have a blanket rule saying that programs with vulnerabilities and no available patch have to be removed. That sort of decision should be made on a case-by-case basis weighing the risks against the loss of functionality also taking into account possible workarounds and availability of alternative software.

Instructions and download of latest flash 64-bit

[Anonymous Coward]

Can be found here: http://nxadm.wordpress.com/2009/04/26/install-64-bit-adobe-flash-player-on-ubuntu-904/ (with md5 of the file, up to date with Ubuntu 10.04 and other distributions).

This guy made it possible for me to convert all my linux installs to 64-bit.

nspluginwrapper

[AusIV]

I think it's worth pointing out that Ubuntu's repositories have always used 32-bit flash + nspluginwrapper even while 64-bit flash was available. I've never found either of these solutions to be particularly stable, but this doesn't mean 64-bit Linux is going without flash completely.

Re:nspluginwrapper

[Jeffrey Baker]

Indeed, nspluginwrapper is the only good way to run flash on any word size. Why would you want to run Flash in-process, regardless of 32/64 compatibility? nspluginwrapper makes the sun shine and the birds sing and the grass grow. It's awesome.

Re:nspluginwrapper

[TheTurtlesMoves]

I am using the 64bit flash on my linux's boxes and have very good stability. My wife is addicted to flash games and facebook. My daughter will watch 3 different youtube videos with facebook games etc are on other tabs. So it gets properly tested. Not only are my systems still very responsive, but i don't get crashes or lockups either.

Ok that's not quite true. Firefox has a very slow memory leak, and it needs to be restarted about once a month. That could be caused by the flash plugin i guess.

Re:nspluginwrapper

[kg4eyf]

Except nspluginwrapper doesn't seem to handle flash 10.1 very well. For example, don't right click on the flash test at http://www.adobe.com/software/flash/about/ Sadly nspluginwrapper's web site and subversion repository have fallen off the net.

Re:nspluginwrapper

[QuantumRiff]

My install of chrome (64bit) on Ubuntu 10.04 (64bit) had some weird flash glitches, till I manually installed Adobe Flash 10.0.45 (64 bit) for linux from the Adobe labs.

Re:nspluginwrapper

[calc]

Yes, the 32-bit flash version running on 64-bit Ubuntu would crash very often. I switched to the 64-bit packages provided by kees in his ppa http://launchpad.net/~kees/ years ago but since Adobe has now dropped 64-bit Flash for Linux it will probably not be installable anymore. The 64-bit version was much more reliable at least as reliable as Flash ever is, of course it still ate CPU like crazy as it does on every platform.

Re:nspluginwrapper

[Anonymous Coward]

Now I understand why Flash chokes on Ubuntu

Re:nspluginwrapper

[deepclutch]

Except nspluginwrapper doesn't seem to handle flash 10.1 very well. For example, don't right click on the flash test at http://www.adobe.com/software/flash/about/ Sadly nspluginwrapper's web site and subversion repository have fallen off the net.

solution is to use latest firefox 3.6.4;explained heayah: http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=53036

Now with a clickable link :)

[Anonymous Coward]

Now with a link :)
http://nxadm.wordpress.com/2009/04/26/install-64-bit-adobe-flash-player-on-ubuntu-904/

Vague Companies

[Anonymous Coward]

Vague companies are vague. Oh, and assholes.

SWF has been open for two years

[tepples]

It's a good thing that this is not available because it'll encourage people to use proper, open formats, and not closed, proprietary, barely-known-about-by-half-the-population formats

SWF (apart from the video codecs) has been open for two years, since Adobe lifted the ban on third-part players as part of the Open Screen Project.

WebM is supported in nightly builds of most popular browsers

The most common browser (49 percent is still a plurality) doesn't support WebM yet. And it won't unless your administrator allows you to install Google Chrome Frame, a version of Google Chrome wrapped up in an IE browser helper object. Nor does WebM support vector animation like that used for Homestar Runner.

Re:SWF has been open for two years

[Sancho]

While the Open Screen project has been around for 2 years, it's only been one year (this month) since the restrictions on SWF were removed.

get some priorities!

[Anonymous Coward]

We must face the facts, personal computing is slowly moving away from a Windows monoculture. It is imperative that we have a cross-platform vector for viri, trojans and malware. If Adobe and Apple don't support Flash, what's that leave us with, Acrobat?!!! Cripes, the evilware development community's going to have to transition to javascript, aren't they?! How else are we going to sell Symantic McAfee for Droid?!!

no big loss

[glebovitz]

It really is no big loss. 64 bit flash for linux never really worked. No Amazon, or Hulu or even check-ins via JetBlue.

I couldn't even use Amazon to start downloads to my TiVo .I am now running 32 bit linux. I got tired of fighting with flash and having to use a windows virtual machine to get my boarding pass.

The Adobe labs web page blamed the problems of flash 64 bit on problems with 64 bit linux.

I never really understand why.

It's not Adobe you should be bitching to...

[Anonymous Coward]

...it's places like Hulu that you should be bitching at. When they (and others) migrate away from Flash because their userbase is dropping, Adobe will start listening. Or die. Either way, it's a good thing.

Re:It's not Adobe you should be bitching to...

[dr. chuck bunsen]

Hahahahahahahahahahahaha. Fucktard.

WTF?! hard to say it but steve jobs was right

[Anonymous Coward]

we are, at least the most of us - linux geeks.
I don't like apple's attitude. actually I think they chain their users but steve jobs was right about one thing. flash is a piece of crap.
I hope html5 will gain popularity and fast.

Can't wait until Flash is gone forever

[apexwm]

I can't wait until HTML5 so we can get rid of Flash once and for all.

Why PAE works in Linux and Mac

[tepples]

Drivers support PAE under Mac OS X because Apple added PAE before making the first public Intel port of Mac OS X. Drivers support PAE under Linux because Linux developers maintain the vast majority of drivers. Neither of these applies to Windows.

64-bit Flash Player 10.1

[Jazzbunny]

Is there 64-bit flash 10.1 available on any platform yet? Paul Betlem (Sr. Director, Engineering at Adobe) writes at their blog: "We're working on 64-bit versions, but I'm unable to share a specific schedule at this point. We do understand the incredibly strong interest in its availability." I can't read anywhere that they gona kill Linux version, or Solaris one for that matter.

Re: Remove Mac OS

[Anonymous Coward]

You shouldn't include mac os because most kool-aid drinkers hate Flash. Performance simply fucking sucks and not just for video.

I really don't understand why anybody with a Mac would want Flash on the iPhone/iPad. Being treated like a second-class citizen sucks.

the truth is...

[buzzilo]

... they fixed that bug that allow me using flash as fast rendering backend in my project : http://code.google.com/p/fxcanvas/ ... everything else is a diversion :)

Wrong reasons

[DrYak]

A few days ago, there was a discussion here about how evil Apple was for trying to kill Flash

They are not evil for trying to kill it. They are evil because of the reasons they try to kill it.

- A good reason to try killing flash : The web should use open standarts that are widely supported (like HTML5 which is supported on pretty much any non-IE. And will probably even get decent IE support in the future. one day. when everyone else will have moved to HTML8.1). The web should not depend on a proprietary technology, which is only documented since really recently (and rather badly), and for which there is only a single vendor providing binary-only plugin for a limited set of platforms (and several rather limited open source implementations, of which most needed to be created by reverse engineering because back when they started there was no documentation at all).

- A wrong reason to kill Flash : because Steve Jobs is a control freak and doesn't want anything un-approved running on an iGadget, on the grounds that this might ruin the "Apple experience" and on the secrete hope to establish a system where Apple can have a share of every single buck earned by app-makers (whereas flash would open the gates to newground and other such website, bringing casual gaming to users outside of apple's control and pocket).
And this not only by offering a walled garden out-of-the-box (which in itself might be a desirable feature for less tachnology savvy users), but also going to great lenght to make sure that 3rd party software isn't easly usable (need to exploit the phone to install it, firmware upgrades almost intentionnally done to brick the phone, etc.) (Which Apple are the only one doing. As opposed to Palm, for example : webOS features a nice walled garden for user who oprefer it, but can be switched into developper mode, simply by typing a command, for those who want homebrew or 3rd party)

I said then, and will repeat here: Fuck you Adobe.

Yup. Fuck Adobe. But fuck Apple too.

Letter to Adobe

[jocknerd]

Dear Adobe,

Are you tired of Apple kicking your ass lately? Then hear me out. If you want to take it to Apple, start porting your apps to Linux. I run nothing but Apple hardware. I would love to go back to Linux full-time. Give me Photoshop and Premiere and I'm there. Otherwise, I will stay with OS X and not use your products.

New "feature" in 10.1: DRM

[200_success]

There is a new clause in the Flash 10.1 EULA that was not present in 10.0:

7.6 Content Protection Technology. If you Use the Adobe Runtimes to access content that has been protected with Adobe Flash Media Rights Management Server or Flash Access software (“Content Protection”), in order to let you play the protected content, the Software may automatically request media usage rights and individualization rights from a rights server on the Internet, and may download and install required components of the Software, including any available Content Protection Updates. You can find more information on Content Protection at http://www.adobe.com/go/protected_content.

You have to download a 3.3 MB PDF with 280 pages to find this kind of stuff. There's no telling how far these updates will go (remember TurboTax DRM?).

SWF restrictions: who has a better citation?

[tepples]

While the Open Screen project has been around for 2 years, it's only been one year (this month) since the restrictions on SWF were removed.

This press release from May 1, 2008, stated that Adobe would be "Removing restrictions on use of the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications". Do you have a citation for your interpretation?

Re:SWF restrictions: who has a better citation?

[Sancho]

Ah, I think I was getting confused--the last release I remembered was the RTMP's specs in June. It's not part of the SWF spec per se, but it is required to build a fully compatible Flash player.

Unfortunately, due to Adobe's support of DRM in Flash Player, we'll never have a fully compatible open-source Flash player. Also, there are patent issues with some of the codecs that Adobe Flash supports. Realistically, there will never be a fully legal, third-party, open source Flash player.

Does Homestar Runner need the patented parts?

[tepples]

Realistically, there will never be a fully legal, third-party, open source Flash player.

Once web sites replace Flash video with HTML5 video using WebM codec, the patented and secret parts of Flash are no longer in play. Even with just the open parts (plus Fluendo's MP3 decoder), you can probably make enough of a Flash player to watch animutations or Homestar Runner.

Hey...

[Anonymous Coward]

...let's play a game! Choose which one of those sentences disgusts you more:

a) "it would be very easy to recompile the plugin for 64-bit machines, but for us to do so the Linux marketshare must be greater than our laziness";

b) "you wouldn't believe the amount of word-size-dependent assembly hacks in this thing, and yes, it was even slower than now before those hacks".

No, you are not allowed to *not* feel disgusted. It's against the game rules. Sorry.

Flash 64Bit Linux Version Confusion - it was never

[d2globalinc]

Yah - it was 10.0.45.2 was latest version of 64bit flash - that had been just kinda a stopping point and put on hold as adobe has been focused on 10.1 development for 32bit all platforms. So they kinda just kept it around.. but now that a major security bug was found in 10.0.45.2, instead of going back and fixing the 64bit version of 10.0.45.2 they just took it offline all together.. SOoooo I'm betting now that 10.1 is official for 32bit / all platforms, they are close to putting out a 10.1 64bit alpha to get that ball rolling again.. Hence forget patching 10.0.x - lets work on new 10.1 and move foward... But I'd like to get some official word from adobe. The current site shows 10.1 beta for 64bit is now closed, when in fact there to my knowledge was NEVER a 10.1 beta, alpha or antyhing else for 64bit linux.. YET...That line on the site and all the news sites that picked it up on the net should state 10.0 Beta Is now closed for 64bit linux... and 10.1 64bit linux beta is not yet available... http://forums.adobe.com/thread/657569?tstart=0 Former 10.0.x BETA page: http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10_64bit.html The latest Official Word from Adobe: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/000/6b3af6c9.html

Link to the download

[digitalme2]

Does anyone have a link to the download? I absentmindedly installed the new version today, figuring it would have 64bit support. Oops.

Spoof iPad UA string to see HTML5 on 64-bit Linux

[gig]

On many sites, if your browser identifies itself as an iPad you will get an HTML5 version of content that would otherwise require FlashPlayer. If you are using a WebKit browser this may improve your browsing experience without Flash. Also works on any platform where you've disabled Flash. I run my Mac browser this way.

You can find the iPad user agent string here:

http://developer.apple.com/safari/library/iPad/index.html#technotes/tn2010/tn2262/index.html

I definitely thought it was strange to see Linux users defending Flash and Adobe lately, considering how much content Flash has hidden from Linux users over the years and the way Flash has propped up Windows and the way it killed the Linux smart book in utero. Some of my favorite HTML5 apps were written and deployed on Linux. An open Web is just too important for this Flash foolishness.

Re:Just installed 64bit Ubuntu on an older HP Lapt

[drinkypoo]

Chrome uses ffmpeg so in theory you could build chrome's ffmpeg with VDPAU support for HTML5 hardware video acceleration on Linux. I just installed from the cutting edge multimedia PPA and now I have vlc doing it. In theory gstreamer-ffmpeg ought to be able to use it also but I'm not sure how to configure it yet.

Re:Spoof iPad UA string to see HTML5 on 64-bit Lin

[soppsa]

Look at all the people claiming Flash haters are 'drinking the Apple-cool-aid' in this comment page alone. The fact is Linux users have had the worst Flash experience since Linux on the desktop existed. The fact that OSX flash sucks too (tho is slightly better than Linux flash) is coincidental. Flash is hardly open since many parts of the standard aren't documented. Seriously fuck Apple all you want, but don't fuck them for hating on Adobe. I say this as a lover of Photoshop too.

Beta?

[Anonymous Coward]

Flash 64-bit never left alpha. It's likely been pulled due to vulnerabilities.