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.

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.

flash killer

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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.

[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.

[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.

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

[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.

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: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.

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: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.

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: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.

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?

[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?

[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.

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.

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?).