Adobe Makes Flash on GNU/Linux Chrome-Only

ekimd writes "Adobe has anounced their plans to abandon future updates of their Flash player for Linux. Partnering with Google, after the release of 11.2, 'the Flash Player browser plugin for Linux will only be available via the 'Pepper' API as part of the Google Chrome browser distribution and will no longer be available as a direct download from Adobe.' Viva la HTML 5!" And it appears that Mozilla won't be implementing Pepper anytime soon.

Comments

Err , not really

[Viol8]

rm -rf ~/.macromedia

Re:Legacy works

[BenoitRen]

You do realise that not all Flash content will migrate, right? A lot of it isn't being looked after by their authors any more.

Re:Goodbye, Adobe

[trnk]

Goodbye Adobe? I must have missed all the articles recently where they announced their decision to mothball their industry-standard tools for image manipulation, post-production, print design, web-prototyping and image workflow.

Flash is a tiny part of what Abobe does, don't expect them to be going anywhere soon.

Re:What about gnash?

[risom]

For videos it's quite fine (I tested youtube and vimeo), but most interactive stuff doesn't work, e.g. games or interactive charts etc.

The really nice thing about gnash ist the platform independence. No problem to watch a video on an old iBook with a Power CPU running Linux. Try that with the adobe player :)

Re:What about gnash?

[jelle]

It's not on the web page, but there is a 0.8.10 from a week ago:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnash/2012-02/msg00000.html

Five years from now

[Anonymous Coward]

What the summary largely skips over is that this plan to abandon Flash on Linux is scheduled to take place five years from now. Adobe is planning to provide updates to their Linux Flash player until then. After five years it's likely HTML5 and Gnash will be up to the task of handling everything people currently use Adobe flash for.

Security support for 5 years

[uberbrodt]

From the press release:

"Adobe will continue to provide security updates to non-Pepper distributions of Flash Player 11.2 on Linux for five years from its release."

If we believe the (mainstream) migration from Flash to HTML5 will be accomplished in that timeframe, I don't see this being a big issue for Firefox or other Linux browsers not using the Pepper API

Re:Terminology

[thesh0ck]

http://www.gnu.org/gnu/why-gnu-linux.html

Re:Chromium?

[uberbrodt]

Looks like they have an implementation of the PPAPI:

http://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/pepper-plugin-implementation

flash

[aahpandasrun]

2 years ago, this would have been AN OUTRAGE! Now? Not so much. Just set your user agent to iPad, and a lot of video sites will work without Flash.

RTFA

[IGnatius T Foobar]

From TFA:

As discussed in the just released Adobe roadmap for the Flash runtimes, Adobe has been working closely with Google to develop a single modern API for hosting plugins within the browser (one which could replace the current Netscape plugin API being used by the Flash Player). The PPAPI, code-named “Pepper” aims to provide a layer between the plugin and browser that abstracts away differences between browser and operating system implementations.

In a typical Slashdot display of sensationalism, the headline reads "Adobe makes flash on Linux Chrome-Only" but they've announced nothing of the sort. Adobe is switching Flash from the increasingly outdated and cumbersone Netscape plugin API to the new PPAPI (Pepper). There is nothing stopping Mozilla from implementing this API. And that's probably what's going to happen. I'd be surprised if there isn't already a team working on it.

Re:Ahem

[Baloroth]

TFA is incredibly light on details, but it seems the main reason you won't be able to use Flash in Firefox is that Firefox won't have the Pepper API. Chromium will. So even if you can't download it directly from Adobe, it should be trivially easy to make it work with Chromium (should be plug-and-play), so people should be able to repackage it and download it using the package-manager of choice. Whether this will be "legal", IDK, it seems like it should. Oh and Adobe says they will continue providing non-Pepper installs on Linux security updates for 5 years, so everyone can just use the current version of Flash in any case.