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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."

15 of 272 comments (clear)

  1. Re:This is why Flash must die. by linuxgeek64 · · Score: 0, Informative

    JavaFX is proprietary.

  2. Re:Not losing much... by chicagoan · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  3. Re:Flash itself supports H.264 by joe_cot · · Score: 4, Informative

    ====* -- 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.

  4. Re:Adobe has one target market: by russotto · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  5. Got an Education? by m509272 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Got an Education? by dougmc · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:Got an Education? by Andy+Dodd · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

      --
      retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
  6. Re:flash killer by rumith · · Score: 2, Informative

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

  7. nspluginwrapper by AusIV · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:nspluginwrapper by kg4eyf · · Score: 2, Informative

      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.

  8. Re:Committed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

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

    Silverlight doesn't support 64-bit yet.

  9. Now with a clickable link :) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative
  10. Re:More than video by Shados · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

  11. Re:Adobe has one target market: by toriver · · Score: 2, Informative

    Tell that to Premiere users. Hear the manic laughter.

  12. Re:Committed by Yaztromo · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.