Slashdot Mirror
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.
Indeed.
I (like most) hate flash. It’s a pain to get running, even more of a pain to get audio working correctly if you use something like jackd, sucks a tonne of resources, crashes all the time, etc.
That said, there have always been _just enough_ headaches around not having flash to make it worth the bother.
I doubt this will kill flash or even make any impact towards that goal. Linux firefox users just isn’t a big enough market. It will however be the shove I needed to look into getting away from requiring flash (alternate video player plugins to watch flash video (99% of my need for flash) and maybe greasemonkey scripts or something to deal with flash navigation on the few sites I can’t simply ignore.
I mean I can always install chrome as just a “flash browser” .. but that sounds really icky.
Flash is on its deathbed anyway. Even Adobe realized that and is migrating everything to HTML5, even employing programmers to implement HTML5/CSS3 features in WebKit.
Adobe gives a 5 year migration period which is probably more that HTML5 needs to succeed widespread.
"And it appears that Mozilla won't be implementing Pepper anytime soon."
Why?
Your days are numbered, and the number is not particularly large.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Oh, sure, I'm sure some people will complain that their favorite game or whatever runs on Flash, and therefore it's a horrible and tragic loss.
But for some of us, it's a performance hog, a security risk, and a general nuisance. I've been avoiding the use of Flash whenever I can get away with it for over a decade. I associate it with annoying ads and ever-cookies more than I do anything useful. In fact, I'm not sure I can name a single site I use that makes use of Flash.
I look forward to the demise of Flash. Sorry that some of you will miss out of Super Duper Happy Fun Cow Clicker or whatever, but I personally will not mourn its loss.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Probably someone who wants to distinguish the GNU/Linux environment, which uses Linux for a kernel and X11 for graphics, from the Android environment, which uses Linux for a kernel but does not use X11.
Flash is on its deathbed anyway.
All the existing Flash animations and games on Weebl's Stuff, Homestar Runner, Kongregate, and Newgrounds are likely to keep SWF on life support for a very long time, be it through Adobe Flash Player or through Gnash.
I said this in an earlier comment, but I've always found there is _just enough_ flash still out there for it to be a headache not to have it.
Flash video is no problem (alternate players, worst case you can just download it and play it out of browser) .. site navigation can be dealt with sometimes.. but there are still a select few sites that you need for whatever reason (banking, work) that are largely flash based. And unfortunately linux firefox users are not a big enough market to push these sites away from flash.
How does putting "GNU" before "Linux" indicate it runs X11? The X Window System isn't a GNU project, nor is it licensed under the GPL.
If you care enough and agree with RMS about the "GNU/Linux" naming issue, you shouldn't have been running Flash in the first place.
UnNetHack: NetHack Improved!
Another Debubuntuian user at Geeknet detected. Generating dump.
"It feels like I'm at the Zoo when reading this thread - I'm frightened, but it's interesting" (c)
rm -rf ~/.macromedia
Actually I see someone writing a PPAPI plugin for Firefox, ala nspluginwrapper.
The PPAPI Adobe will be using is common to both the Chromium and Chrome browser (they are both based on the same source code), so this will have zero impact on Chromium users.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Browsers have been deleting "un-deletable supercookies" those since Flash 10.3. Though the more visible effect is users deleting their Flash game save data without meaning to.
If your bank is using flash for account management you need to get a new bank.
They also should have supported ActiveX, right?
Chrom*'s the only browser to support PPAPI as of now.
I've been doing rich client development in Flash ever since 2000 and to me the Flash Player for x86/Linux was a big selling point. True x-platform RTE with a huge amount of awesome features and a very good programming language with AS2 and AS3. A free cli compiler for all major platforms including Linux and an awesome workflow for building custom UIs with the Flash IDE.
I don't think there will be such a widespread and powerfull platform again in the future - it's a shame Adobe missed out on the whole touch revolution in the Flash dept. Just last year I bought my last stack of OReillys for Flex and AS development for a project I had. ... Guess that will have been my last. Just this morning I though of stashing them away to make room for my new C++ stack.
For me, one thing is for sure: As awesome as Flash was, it is the one and only proprietary platform and technology I will ever have invested significant time in. From here on out it's only truely OSI compliant FOSS technologies and PLs for me. That was also the main reason I didn't move into Unity3D when I was doing game development a while back.
Flash/AS it was a great 11 years. You will be missed.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
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
It's a fun rollercoaster.
Used to be a major pain to get flash running on linux. Then it got a little easier. Then 64bit came out and it got annoying again. Then they released a 64bit plugin and it got easier (unless you run jackd, then it's a royal pain in the ass). Then they stopped updating it and it became annoying.. then they did update it and it became easier again.. ANNNDDD now it's gonna get annoying again :D
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
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
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.
In Adobe's announcement regarding the end of mobile Flash support, they stated that they were conceding to HTML5 in the web browser and will be focusing on moving Flash to desktop platform application development. While I suppose it was subtly stated, the implication was that they intend to phase out Flash as a browser plug-in entirely. Linux/X11 was already the most difficult for them to implement and had the highest cost/benefit, so it makes perfect sense for it to be the first to go. I imagine Google wants to keep Legacy Flash for Chrome on Linux if for no other reason than to secure another leg up on the browser competition. Overall, Google probably would just assume Flash die off, but if they can get buy-in from Linux users and push WebM and Dart in the process, then it's worth the effort.
What I don't get is the total cluelessness on display here. let me get this straight, you are FOR software freedom and FOSS, yes? So you boo the software that actually lets you install it royalty free, and even lets you make your own free clone called gnash, and in return you fricking CHEER having the web taken over by a "standard" that is run by a company that might as well have "Pay your $699 license fee you cock smoking teabaggers" as its motto? Did I miss a meeting? Was there an episode in the series i skipped?
HTML V5 is gonna be locked down tighter than a nun's thighs and is controlled by one of the most aggressive patent trolls there has ever been and THAT is good? Has everyone kinda had a senior moment and forgot that H.264 is patented up the ass and is controlled by a conglomeration that will happily sue your ass if you look at them funny? If anything everyone should be having a royal shitfit and refuse to have a damned thing to do with HTML V5 until it takes either WebM or Theora as the lowest common denominator. because as it is now frankly you're all about to get severely buttraped and you don't even see that train sized penis headed right at you. With Flash Adobe has never bitched, you want flash, gnash, whatever its cool. With H.264 if you don't break out the checkbook you ain't distributing shit, and what do you think will happen when the DRM hits? you DO know its coming yes? you don't think they are gonna let netflix show movies without it do you? What do you think happens then? I'll tell ya what then if you don't pay your license fee and set up some kind of secure path you'll be breaking DMCA if you have H.264 in your distro that's what.
So please think people, yes I use Windows but I sure as hell don't want Apple and MSFT and Google controlling the web between them, we've seen what corporate crap ends up with real player and WMV, lets not go back to that alright? The FOSS guys are the ones that run the web, yes? After all that's what you brag all the time, so do something! Refuse to support HTML V5 until a standard that anybody can use is the lowest common denominator. Because if you don't Apple and Google and MSFT will pay their $699 license fees and the rest of you will get to be locked out. Think folks, you are so blinded by hatred of flash you are laughing about beating the old dog down while a pack of lions are about to have you for dinner.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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
In addition to the tons of legacy content that will never be converted (due to limitations in tools, or abandonment), there is a lot of new content for which HTML 5 in not appropriate.
For example, there are a lot of nice video streaming services out there, and they all have been forced to use some sort of DRM by content providers. While I refuse to accept DRM on products I buy, I don't have an issue with it for rental/subscription services as long as it is available on the platforms I use, which can be an issue even without DRM. With Silverlight DRM not being included in Moonlight, you already could not watch Netflix and some live sports, now with Flash being discontinued for Linux, there will be no way to watch Hulu Plus, Amazon Instant Video, or any of the streaming video provided by networks. This is a use of Flash that HTML5 will never replace, because of valid ideological differences in the purpose of open web standards.
I don't consider a tool that is used for 90% of commercial video streaming, with no migration path to other tools to be "on its deathbed".
http://www.gnu.org/gnu/why-gnu-linux.html
Looks like they have an implementation of the PPAPI:
http://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/pepper-plugin-implementation
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.
Newer versions of firefox can even watch Youtube videos without flash...
So, overall, I don't think I'm missing anything without flash on my computer, except a lot of stuff I'd rather miss anyway.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
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.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Odd. The only two sites I've run into in a long time that required flash -
Square-Enix has some sites. Oooh, "big" loss there.
Oracle's support site that they just recently replaced - and there was a flash-free alternative that they tried to avoid telling people about.
Many video sites now have non-flash based players (H.264) too.
Honestly, flash isn't the big needed thing it once was. Hopefully it continues to fade into oblivion.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Given we are talking about Flash (graphical application) and Linux (OS kernel), the posterior probability that one running GNU userland would use X11 (like xorg) is almost one. Licenses have nothing to do with that sentence.
`echo $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com
Guess you don't know about this:
"Luckily for those who run Linux, the H.264 codec (also known as the Advanced Video Codec, or AVC) has a successful and effective open-source implementation known as x264. In fact, the x264 Project won the Doom9 2005 codec comparison test (see the on-line Resources). x264 continues to make progress and improvements, and it remains an active project."
HTML V5 is gonna be locked down tighter than a nun's thighs and is controlled by one of the most aggressive patent trolls there has ever been and THAT is good? Has everyone kinda had a senior moment and forgot that H.264 is patented up the ass and is controlled by a conglomeration that will happily sue your ass if you look at them funny?
Well, most flash video is H.264 too, it's pretty hard to argue that HTML5/H.264 will be worse than Flash/H.264. Right now the alternatives to H.264 are as dead as Ogg Theora was to music but since everybody's blocking each other I assume the status quo will be maintained until the H.264 patents expire in the 2020s. You're pretending like this achieves something but I don't see how, except to continue promoting flash over HTML. You may notice that all the other players that now play YouTube videos dropped flash, but continue to use H.264. There's absolutely zero traction for moving away.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Except Flash is only bundled with Chrome (not Chromium), and they're getting rid of direct downloads of flash, potentially making it impossible to legally get it for Chromium.
Sort of. Google has access to the Flash source, and the Flash shipping in Chrome is modified from stock flash; it has different version numbers and carries various patches Google has made but not (yet, possibly) upstreamed.
And http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3621263 (from a Google employee) makes it pretty clear that Google is involved in helping maintain Pepper Flash.
I'm with you. I dislike flash too, but removing the player from a smaller user base won't eradicate it from the web. One other thing to consider: I can't help but feel that the explosion of javascript in recent months/years is nearing the resource hot status that Flash originally was.
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.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
That's the idea. "post-webkit" would mean "after everybody moved to webkit". There are still exceptions, but it seems like pretty much everybody who needs a third party web rendering engine these days uses webkit, relegating Gecko to being used only in Mozilla products. As an example: pretty much all smartphones use webkit. Windows Phone is the exception, but it has virtually no marketshare at this point (which is too bad, it's nice to code for).
Too bad x264 is one big pile of patent infringement if used in Slashdot's home country.
The thing was that it was Adobe that footed the bill for the H.264 licenses when it was flash based, not the browsers. And since Firefox is, essentially, a charity case, it'll be hit worse when the licence fee is shifted to them.
I believe atm the only way to view H.264 content in FF is through the use of a Microsoft developed plugin (and in this case, MS pays the bill), and that's Windows 7 only. And after the whole click-sniffing fiasco with their Bing Toolbar, I am really wary of installing anything browser-based from them.
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
Bottom line: upgrade or die. You are in an end of life cycle for Flash.
If the owner of copyright in a work available only in an end-of-life format cannot be reached for permission to upgrade the format, why should such work become unavailable to the public?
You've been warned.
A lot of these authors aren't even in the scene anymore to hear the warning.
I don't see what that page has to do with the issue. Sorry if I misread it, but the problem is not that Chromium doesn't support it (since is basically the same browser as Chrome), is that Adobe says they are not distributing the player themselves, so it seems like you have to install Chrome to get the player, even if you plan to use it on other browser.
Adobe removed their AIR packages from their repo's even though leaving the old v2.6 AIR was still relevant and useful for a lot of users. One could easily view this as being somewhat vindictive against Linux users because it couldn't have costed them anything just to leave the old version sitting in the repo. I imagine that they will also remove flash from their adobe yum repo making any installation potentially too difficult for many users and makes it harder **even if you want to use an old version of an OS**. They did leave a 32bit binary installtion but that fails in so many ways with complex dependencies.
e.g. I've had to use an old version of Fedora in a virtualbox just to use Balsamiq (the funky wireframe screen builder tool). I spoke to the people at balsamiq telling them about this dependency and they basically said that Adobe won't listen to them (I guess they are too small - but a bit stupid to deliver their product on someone elses platform that they have no control over)
regarding the "[sic]" - fanboi is used as a derogatory, typically emphasizing the particularly silly nature of the fanaticism in that case. From when I've seen it use, it's meant to be a bit meaner and condescending than just '"fanboy".
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
The HTML 5 spec does not dictate that H.264 video be used for the tag. In fact, the W3C state that web browsers are free to implement whatever video codecs they choose, and actually recommend they support a free and open codec.
Whilst I share your concern on the use of H.264 with regard to free and open access to all, this has nothing to do with HTML 5 in the slightest. The codec issue has been with us for years, regardless of platform or delivery method. Your rant should be directed at browser and web developers instead.
I'd go as far to say HTML5 is pretty much the only hope you have for a free and open codec to become widely adopted, in that it does not discriminate between formats. Only web developers (the encoders) and web browsers (the decoders) do that, so we should go bitch at them.
anyone using flash for navigation probably has a "if they can't use the site, tough" attitude
I've yet to see a website where it would be absolutely impossible to replace site navigation with a text link as a fallback. Obviously there are times flash is appropriate. Site navigation isn't in my opinion one of them, or at the very least, gracefull degredation is generally a good idea.
There's a difference between Chrome and Chromium Browser.
It's the same difference between GNU/Linux and Linux and between America and United States. That is, a pedantic one that only means something to people who already have an opinion on the matter. I say chrome on linux, people know what I'm talking about based on context.
The GNU/Linux naming issue has nothing whatsoever to do with the use of proprietary blobs, even though your completely uneducated opinion is widely held. Read "Free as in Freedom" before trying to express yourself on the subject.
"DRM is like the Ford Pinto: it's a smooth ride, right up the point at which it explodes and ruins your day."-C.Doctorow
So are you arguing in favor of having just one widely used engine, with no competition at all?
Yes. But freedom of speech also implies freedom of deliberate wrong pronunciation :-P
-- no sig today
Actually, Chromium [Browser] is Chrome [Browser] without Google's "spyware" (loaded term, but you get the idea).
The net can't afford the risk of Google, arguably losing sight of its onetime "don't be evil" ethos, attaining a complete lock on the browser development agenda. Therefore Mozilla must not ever be "embraced and exterminated" by Chrome, and it will not be.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
The real problem is that ultimately it was not Linux that decided to call itself GNU or GNU/Linux, but it was Stallman who decided this. That's what made it controversial because it felt like he was co-opting it. Sure he had a lot of good reasons for his decision but it lacked tact and grace.
Right now the term GNU/Linux versus Linux serves as a positive correlation between those who want to make a political statement versus those who are talking about the technology.
http://www.google.ca/chrome/intl/en/privacy.html
It's not too bad, if you're happy with essentially the same information being passed as for a Google search for every page you visit.
here I happen to agree with RMS just because it describes it unambiguously and is shorter than saying "NonAndroidNonCrazyEmbeddedNonObscurePetProjectLinuxDistribution".
I will still run evil software as I don't want to run crappy graphics drivers that turn my hardware into a pile of shit, and lose streamed video and occasional audio, dialing the web back to 1994.