Adobe Releases Last Linux Version of Flash Player

dartttt writes "Adobe has released Flash Player version 11.2 with many new features. This is the final Flash Player release for Linux platform and now onward there will be only security and bug fix updates. Last month Adobe announced that it is withdrawing Flash Player support for Linux platform. All the future newer Flash releases will be bundled with Google Chrome using its Pepper API and for everything else, 11.2 will be the last release."

Comments

Hulu Desktop?

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess this means the end of Hulu Desktop for PCs and embedded devices? What a shame.... one of the few reasons I preferred Hulu to other content providers.

Re:Hulu Desktop?

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck Hulu and the copyright horse they rode in on! They block access outside the country. You should never support people who do that kind of thing. You're aiding and abetting the corruption and balkanization of the internet.

Re:Hulu Desktop?

[TheRaven64]

Not for embedded. Linux is a bit disingenuous here. It means Linux / Mozilla plugin infrastructure / X11. Adobe will keep supporting Flash on Android, for example.

Re:Hulu Desktop?

[Anonymous Coward]

No they won't. That was killed too.

Re:Hulu Desktop?

[Anonymous Coward]

Adobe will keep supporting Flash on Android, for example.

Not according to Adobe they won't...

http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2011/11/flash-focus.html

Re:Hulu Desktop?

[Anonymous Coward]

^^^this times a million. play globally or gtfo. the internet should not be region-ized. Perhaps making the internet its own region would solve manyu woes. Local laws already do the job of illegal things, anything else is overhanded and superfluous.

Re:Hulu Desktop?

[mcavic]

I agree, but it's not Hulu instituting the restrictions, it's the copyright holders, and apparently Hulu sucks at negotiating.

Re:Hulu Desktop?

[Anonymous Coward]

You should bitch to Hulu, not /. or Adobe. You should also bitch at Youtube for dragging ass with their HTML5 support.

Also, Hulu is doing it wrong anyway. It costs extra to watch it on a mobile general purpose computing device (e.g. a tablet) vs other general purpose computing devices (e.g. a PC). If you want to watch it on your web TV? Free content is now pay content just because. The same shit, free on one device, for pay on another. Next it will be more based on brand name and there'll be a bill passed to insure no one tampers with useragent strings.

Oh well... back to torrents because media companies are clueless as usual. Stupid me for thinking that they could just do what they've always done with TV and generate revenue from ads. (Better than just ads, ads custom tailored to the viewer... but lets not fuss with the details.)

Re:Hulu Desktop?

[craigminah]

Have you complained about DVD regions or just Hulu's restrictions which, as someone has already pointed out, are mandated by the copyright holders and not by Hulu.

Re:Hulu Desktop?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://thepiratebay.se/ FTW.

Re:Hulu Desktop?

[Karlt1]

Adobe will keep supporting Flash on Android, for example.

You didn't get the memo?

http://www.gottabemobile.com/2011/11/08/adobe-abandoning-flash-for-android-mobile-platforms/

Re:Hulu Desktop?

[jedidiah]

DVD regions are trivial to defeat. Multi-region players are available widely, cheaply, and legally. In some jurisdictions, it's even legally mandated that disk players not enforce those restrictions.

DVD regions are a paper tiger compared to web services.

Re:Hulu Desktop?

[interval1066]

Hulu was a good idea dragged into irrelevancy by licensing. All the big content licensors wanted waay too much for their content to allow hulu to make any kind of decent profit.

Re:Hulu Desktop?

[gottabeme]

They probably want Hulu to "fail", because then they can say, "We tried but it didn't work," and then push people to their own, private platforms with individual subscription fees--or make deals with ISPs to raise rates and bundle subscriptions that don't count against bandwidth quotas.

I think our best alternative is to just do something else. Make our own TV shows, or don't watch TV altogether. Life goes on.

Re:Hulu Desktop?

[TheRaven64]

I've already been modded down, so I didn't think I needed to comment again, but reading TFA it seems that Adobe is completely abandoning Flash development on Linux. However, Google is now going to be responsible for Flash in Chrome. Given that Chrome runs on Android and Google has a source license to Flash, I wouldn't be surprised if they keep supporting it in Android too. Flash support is one of the major advantages Android has over iOS, so I'd be surprised if they abandoned it...

Re:Hulu Desktop?

[hairyfeet]

Sorry friend, Adobe killed those too. Mark my words and mark them well, all those that are celebrating the "death of flash"? Boy are YOU gonna be buttfucked.

You see Adobe was paying for YOUR H.264 license fees, guess who is gonna pay for that now? That would be nobody, that's who. And mark my words MPEG-LA is gonna make SCO look like the Care Bears, in fact if the rumors are true they will be able to pretty much lock anybody but the big three, Apple, Google, and MSFT, out of Internet content, how? DRM. Rumor is H.265 will support protected path and HDMI which means it'll be a DMCA violation if you even attempt to reverse engineer it.

So mark my words, Google WILL end up "pulling a TiVo" when it comes to Android, because if it don't they won't be able to play H.265 videos on their phones. Apple and MSFT of course won't care, they'll pay their $699 license fee, so who does that leave out in the cold? Why that would be Linux, which nobody is gonna want if it can't play the latest videos.

To me the sad part is it could have been avoided if all those supposedly "pro freedom" website developers would have stood up to Apple and said "We are NOT gonna support your devices until you support a FOSS codec as a baseline standard" but instead everyone saw the crazy money iShiny users were spending and went apeshit. Now you watch, within 5 years articles will be saying "What happened? Why did the web end up locked down to a three way split?" and it will simply be because everyone was stupid, they turned on the company that did not care if you distributed and even didn't give a shit if you made a FOSS knockoff, and instead embraced a company made of patent trolling, simply because the great and powerful Jobs said it will be thus.

Re:Hulu Desktop?

[interval1066]

They probably want Hulu to "fail", because then they can say, "We tried but it didn't work," and then push people to their own, private platforms with individual subscription fees--or make deals with ISPs to raise rates and bundle subscriptions that don't count against bandwidth quotas.

But they've been doing that, and every effort appears to have failed. Part of that problem is they olny offer they're own media, or can't come to good enough agreements with each other. Again the lincensors are too greedy I think.

Re:Hulu Desktop?

[gottabeme]

Yep, greed is their biggest problem. But it looks like they will gradually get their way. Do you think Hulu will still exist in 3 years, or that it will still have free content that's even slightly recent or worth watching?

Re:Hulu Desktop?

[TheRealFixer]

Hulu ARE the copyright holders. They're 90% owned by NBC, FOX and ABC, so of course they have no negotiating power with their masters. It's why everything with Hulu sounds like a great idea at first, and is then immediately crippled by draconian DRM and advertising idiocy.

Re:Hulu Desktop?

[drdaz]

Given that Chrome runs on Android and Google has a source license to Flash, I wouldn't be surprised if they keep supporting it in Android too.

Adobe would be surprised it seems...

http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplayer/2012/02/flash-chrome-for-android-beta.html

Re:Hulu Desktop?

[KingMotley]

And Mozilla. It's a 4 way race, but that's what we have now. The rest of the browsers are too insignificant to matter and will continue to not matter anyhow.

Quite the opposite of you, I WANTED flash to die. It's terrible, crashes, and makes the internet a worse place. h.264 was the best codec, and it won out. Good for the market. I'm not sorry if it'll cost you $.10 to download your insignificant browser.

Re:Hulu Desktop?

[interval1066]

Well, not having used hulu ever I don't know anything about their content, but I can't see it still being around. I see their problem in the media, so... probably not. But still, their backers seem to have deep pockets. Not sure how much their willing to prop it up.

Re:Hulu Desktop?

[hairyfeet]

So even you admit its the death of the whole "free as in beer" part of FOSS. And frankly it doesn't bother me, i use Windows where MSFT pays my license fee. what DOES bother me is frankly i don't believe the web should be locked down as we already saw what that got us with IE and all those damned proprietary formats like RMV and WMV. I had hope that the developers would stand their ground and refuse to support HTML V5 until a baseline codec was chosen that ALL could use without getting "pay your $699 license fee" but it looks like that is over.

I DO however find it funny as hell the "FOSSies", those that are the rampant fanbois of the FOSS world, can't even see the freight train barreling down the tracks. they had such a fucking hatred for Flash because it was buggy they are too fucking clueless to see what it is obviously gonna be replaced with has more ways to buttfuck them than SCO ever even dreamed of and you know what? Unlike SCO these patents WILL stick and royally assrape any chance of "free as in beer" remaining a viable option.

Personally I'm glad, maybe once free as in beer is thrown in the trash heap of history they will wake the fuck up and realize TINSTAAFL and maybe with all the major distros being forced to charge to pay their $699 license fees and to remove the right to redistribute (because MPEG-LA sure as fuck isn't gonna sell you a blanket license for shit) then MAYBE, just maybe, will the distros have enough funds to make a truly world class OS instead of constantly breaking shit. One can hope after all.

BTW isn't it funny that I get modded as a troll for daring to point out reality? Does ANYONE believe MPEG-LA is gonna be all warm and fuzzy to the Linux community, when it has over 2000+ patents that pretty much cover EVERY possible way to encode and decode video and has been willing to bitchslap anyone and everyone with a lawsuit if they don't pay their $699 license fees? pretty damned funny if you ask me that so many are blinded by their perception bubbles to see they just threw away the mangy old mutt that was friendly known as flash for a rabid pitbull that looks at their ass like a starving man looks at a T-Bone steak. Fucking stupid FOSSies are gonna get run over like a Mac truck and are too damned clueless to even see it coming, too fucking funny.

Re:Hulu Desktop?

[KingMotley]

It doesn't necessarily have to be the end of free as in free as beer, but worst case scenario it is, sure. You might as well be complaining that mozilla has to pay for bandwidth for everyone to download the browser from their site, or grab add-ins. That isn't free either. They'll just pay the license fee out of the revenue they get from google for having them as their default search engine. Whoopee.

Not all "FOSSies" are clueless, they just aren't just aren't as a religious zealot about not using h.264 as you are. They are actually fairly smart about doing what's best for themselves, usually. If you actually studied most of the technologies in h.264, VP8, WMV, etc, you'd realize if a patent likely applies to one, would apply to them all. The open source codecs aren't all that different from the proprietary ones that they would likely escape either.

And yes, I would consider your post to be TROLLING, as it really didn't do anything but complain and spread FUD.

Re:Hulu Desktop?

[shutdown -p now]

Google already has a beta version of Chrome running on Android. And one thing that it doesn't do that every other Android browser does is, support Flash.

Re:Hulu Desktop?

[tepples]

Rumor is H.265 will support protected path and HDMI which means it'll be a DMCA violation if you even attempt to reverse engineer it.

What business does a codec have with digital restrictions management technologies? I thought that was the province of the container. The only time I've ever seen an interaction between a codec and DRM has been BD+, in which the encoder can warp portions of a video to make them easier to encode, and then code on the disc running in a VM can refuse to unwarp them if the playback environment doesn't meet basic spot checks.

Re:Hulu Desktop?

[Tsingi]

We shouldn't be supporting H.264 anyway.

Re:Hulu Desktop?

[hairyfeet]

Pointing out a patent troll is a patent troll is FUD? can I have some of what you are smoking please?

That would be like screaming TROLL when someone says "Rambus is a patent troll". Actually its even worse than that as Rambus did make the occasional product whereas the ONLY reason MPEG-LA exists is to troll, that's it. they don't make any tech, pay for any research, they are a pile of patents gotten together to make sure everyone in the pool gets a cut from their trolling without having their own names being dragged through the muck as trolls.

But if you think it is FUD show me ONE, just one mind you, case in which MPEG-LA was friendly and/or supportive of FOSS. I can already tell you that you ain't gonna find shit, on the other hand you will find plenty of cases of them being hostile to FOSS such as saying they would sue Mozilla if they tried to include H.264 support without paying their license fees.

In the end this doesn't have a damned thing to do with the technical merits of H.264, that is a red herring and in fact Flash often used h.264. No what mattered is that the community was biting the hand that feeds because Adobe was paying the license fee for the ENTIRE community, well guess what? that's over, pay up suckers.

In the end the ONLY ones that got trolled was the FOSS community which Steve jobs played like a harp from hell. It was common knowledge that Jobs hated Flash because it offered a way around his app store, so he talked about how much better his iShiny was without flash and the FOSS community jumped right on board, even though Jobs has always been militant ANTI-FOSS and actually made gates and MSFT look like the Care Bears. it was Jobs that first locked devices to the OS, it was Jobs that first added DRM so you could only use it HIS way, while Adobe let you do any damned thing you wanted, including both distributing AND making a knockoff, did they sue? nope.

So as I said i don't care, my license fees are paid for. if the rumors are correct then Moz will ONLY have H.264 on Windows because MSFT pays their fees, and all it takes is MPEG-LA filing an injunction to have the plugged pulled on X.264 because of their patents. I was simply pointing out the absolute batshit insanity of getting rid of a FOSS friendly if a little clueless company like Adobe for a FOSS hating patent troll. But hey, enjoy your lack of media or paying for your software, my fees are paid in full thanks to MSFT.

Re:Hulu Desktop?

[cheesybagel]

Microsoft has WMV9 or VC-1 as a fallback while Google has WebM.

Re:Hulu Desktop?

[cheesybagel]

If they do it, it will just make more people switch to WebM. Their containers are already well known to suck. Even DivX support Matroska containers and they are in the business of selling a MPEG-4 codec implementation. The sound codec can be Vorbis or FLAC.

Re:Hulu Desktop?

[cheesybagel]

It will just be GIF vs PNG all over again. Is Unisys still around?

Re:Hulu Desktop?

[JDG1980]

No one with modern hardware should need to pay any additional H.264 licensing fees, because the video hardware already supports decoding the bitstream. This has been the case for all PC video devices except the crappy Atom integrated chipset for about 5 years, and is the case with all current smartphone/tablet chipsets. The license fees were already paid by the hardware vendor. All software has to do is send the bitstream to the driver via the correct API. No use of H.264 patents in the software, no license fees.

Re:Hulu Desktop?

[KingMotley]

You have some very strange views my friend. MPEG-LA exists so that something reasonable could be done about all the patents that are involved with specific codecs, and people who wanted to license it could do so from one place rather than dozens. I'm not sure how that is considered being a troll, but apparently having to actually pay for stuff means "troll" to you.

As for something that MPEG-LA did that was friendly and/or supportive of FOSS (although I wonder why it's all about FOSS with you). Here: http://www.mpegla.com/Lists/MPEG%20LA%20News%20List/Attachments/231/n-10-08-26.pdf Not sure how what they do is more or less friendly towards FOSS than commercial products other than FOSS can't be completely free if they want to use other people's work.

In the end this doesn't have a damned thing to do with the technical merits of H.264, that is a red herring and in fact Flash often used h.264. No what mattered is that the community was biting the hand that feeds because Adobe was paying the license fee for the ENTIRE community, well guess what? that's over, pay up suckers.

Not sure what your ranting is all about here, as a web developer of a fairly large set of websites myself, I'm serving h.264 videos for FREE without any stupid flash RIGHT NOW, and it works across all major browsers, and all major smartphones. It's called HTML 5, and it works great, you should try it. Oh, and I paid NOTHING for it, neither as a developer, a publisher, an end user, or as a producer (Many of our videos are our own creation) -- nothing beyond the price of the software that we would have had anyway.

In the end the ONLY ones that got trolled was the FOSS community which Steve jobs played like a harp from hell. It was common knowledge that Jobs hated Flash because it offered a way around his app store, so he talked about how much better his iShiny was without flash and the FOSS community jumped right on board, even though Jobs has always been militant ANTI-FOSS and actually made gates and MSFT look like the Care Bears. it was Jobs that first locked devices to the OS, it was Jobs that first added DRM so you could only use it HIS way, while Adobe let you do any damned thing you wanted, including both distributing AND making a knockoff, did they sue? nope.

Steve jobs hated flash because it crashed A LOT, gave terrible user experiences, ran like crap and sucked down mobile batteries super fast. I rarely miss flash on my iStuff, and I'm glad that it isn't using flash to play video. It just isn't a good user experience when the battery dies out half way through the day. Droids with the early flash builds (early meaning a year AFTER the whole no flash on iOS thing) sucked down the batteries in those terrible. It wasn't until 10.1 which just came out fairly recently that it supported hardware acceleration, and stopped being such a terrible battery hog. Heck flash didn't even support hardware acceleration on the mac at that point either. I'm not sure why anyone would be crying about that bloated piece of crap getting phased out, it's long been time, and it should have and would have been if it wasn't for the lack of a valid video standard on the web, which there now is. As for the rest of your tirade, Jobs was not the ANTI-FOSS, he based his iOS on FOSS, and it still is. Jobs wasn't the first to lock devices to a particular OS, in fact almost ALL devices are locked to their own OS. Unless you've upgraded your fridge, washer, drier, or car to a different OS. You can't change the OS on the nintendo/nintendo 64/sega/ps1/ps2/ps3(anymore)/xbox/xbox 360. So you'd be totally wrong there. iDevices aren't the first, nor the last, just one that you apparently want to change and tens of millions of other customers just DONT CARE. They want stuff that works, and they work great, better than the alternatives.

So as I said i don't care

Re:Hulu Desktop?

[westyvw]

I have no idea why you are always on the tirade against FOSS software. My guess is that you are a clueless troll. I have noticed you dont seem to understand or be able to use Linux while my customers keep wanting Linux on their desktop because Windows keeps breaking.

Ubuntu (due to the sites you are linking) is not my favorite either, and I say so what? There are choices. Ubuntu is not the gold standard.

But more to your point, we have rode it out before, MPEGLA can slap around law suits and bitch and moan all they like, in fact, I would think bring it on. This is no surprise to the Linux community, we know they are going to play unfair. What you should be focusing on is how this will affect you. Microsoft pay your license? Sure today, but for how long?

Using Microsoft and Apple is like being a cheerleader for a team, learning Linux is knowing how to play the game.

Re:Hulu Desktop?

[TheRaven64]

And it's a beta version. Now that they're the ones responsible for developing Flash for Chrome, do you think that will continue?

Re:Hulu Desktop?

[shutdown -p now]

Yes. Reason being, Flash always was and remains a very sorry experience on any Android device - even top of the line tablets - both performance-wise, and as far as UI goes (interferes with swipe-to-scroll, hard to operate with touch in general). It seems that Google has caught on to that, and they no longer emphasize Flash as their killer feature, the way they did when it first came out. Sure, it's all fixable, but would likely require a considerable investment of developer resources that Android could use elsewhere. In the meantime, because Apple refuses to support Flash, most mobile-enabled web sites avoid using in the first place, so it's far less critical on mobile devices that it is on the desktop.

Re:Hulu Desktop?

[craigminah]

So that makes DVD regions acceptable to you (e.g. because they're easily defeated) and Hulu's limitations are unacceptable (e.g. because they're more difficult to defeat)? I love your "logic". "I prefer 7-11's because they're easy to rob, those dang banks piss me off though though so I'll curse them and shake my fist angrily in their general direction." WTF?

Re:Hulu Desktop?

[Anonymous Coward]

They just aren't just aren't free as in free as in beer.

Re:Hulu Desktop?

[galanom]

Not an IP expert, but here's _my_ $0.02

mp3 is not the best format ever made. Countless formats offer better quality/size ratio. But because Franhoffer does not care to collect any fees from the average Joe and because it does NOT implement any "security" feature, it prevailed.

Re:Hulu Desktop?

[theshowmecanuck]

It's countries like Canada that allow it. They kowtow to Rogers, Bell, Telus, Shaw, and whatever passes for slimebags in Quebec. They make me waste money on U.S. proxies... actually not any more, I got sick of paying the view tax and found better things to do with my time.

Re:Hulu Desktop?

[improfane]

You write like a paid poster :-(

Re:Hulu Desktop?

[KingMotley]

And how does a paid poster write? Are you refering to my ability to put together complete sentences that are spelled correctly? Or I'm fairly good at using the correct punctuation?

Oh, you mean that I have my opinions, they happen to be contrary to yours, and I won't back down when faced with ignorance. Ok.

Fcuk you Adobe

[karolbe]

We don't need yout stinky Flash!

Re:Fcuk you Adobe

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck you, spelling!

We don't need you, stinky letters!

Re:Fcuk you Adobe

[rainmouse]

We don't need a stinky user base!

Fixed it for you.

Re:Fcuk you Adobe

[Anonymous Coward]

It's would seem that adobe themselves see no great future in Flash, after HTML5. Given firefox is going to soon suppoer h.264, I'm not entirely sure why I want flash (unless you play flash games, I guess).

Re:Fcuk you Adobe

[Mindcontrolled]

Given the incredible breadth of Linux adoption on the desktop, I am sure that Adobe are quivering in their boots by now.

Okay

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll return the favor, and dump you now, Adobe.

Re:Okay

[tixxit]

Posting to reverse accidental negative mod. Sorry.

Re:Okay

[Anonymous Coward]

absolutely spot on mate. the linux world will join the growing crowd of people who refuse to have anything to do with flash anymore... in fact it would be true to say that hardly anyone uses it at all.

look at how youtube have stopped using it for their videos. html5 has really taken off in this area.

and the way it's taken over the huge and rapidly growing browser game market almost completely has shocked everyone.

if you get a slight headache reading this then that's just the reality distortion field getting to work on you. just keep reading slashdot and you should be ok.

Re:Okay

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple already dumped Flash. If Adobe dumps Linux, then so will I.

Re:Okay

[Anonymous Coward]

Flash is the only Adobe product I use. I prefer the pdf reader Okular over acroread.

I suppose I'll continue using flash until the distros phase it out. Time will tell how it pans out from there

Good Riddance

[Fireking300]

I expect Flash to be phased out in favor of non-proprietary alternatives in the near future(3-4 Years).

Re:Good Riddance

[Elbereth]

...but not on Slashdot, which just rolled out a Flash-based feature.

Re:Good Riddance

[realityimpaired]

About half of youtube works without Flash installed. Other video sites, not so much... blip.tv (which is the other one I use fairly regularly) has actually discontinued their html5 support in favour of going 100% flash.

Ultimately, my choice was between installing Flash and using the browser of my choice, or installing Chrome for Linux. I went with flash, but I am not happy with the decision. It's sort of a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation.

Re:Good Riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

I expect Flash to be phased out in favor of non-proprietary alternatives

Such as HTML5 wrappers around the proprietary H264 codec? Fantastic.

Re:Good Riddance

[Nrrqshrr]

Am one of those guys who try to make a living out of flash games, and I can tell you that this isn't very good news for us. A couple of months ago, they withdrew flash support for mobile, and now for Linux.
it's like Adobe wants the death of flash.

Re:Good Riddance

[Yvan256]

Vimeo works 100% without Flash, unlike YouTube.

Re:Good Riddance

[TheRaven64]

About half of youtube works without Flash installed

I've been using ClickToPlugin, which fetches the HTML5 version of YouTube videos for a while and I've not seen the Flash player for a good six months.

Re:Good Riddance

[m0n]

I agree - I work in web advertisement (Click here to buy useless crap!) dpt for broadcast media and we've currently been in training to learn HTML5 and phasing out as much Flash elements as possible. So much more you can do for Mobile using HTML5.

Re:Good Riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

You of all people should have seen the writing on the wall years ago. You didn't even investigate technologies to enable porting to iPhone?

Re:Good Riddance

[hobarrera]

Adobe and the rest of the world, yes, that's what we want.

Re:Good Riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

Get in line. I've been waiting years for true utf8 support here.

Re:Good Riddance

[WrecklessSandwich]

You should probably start looking into making your games with less terrible technology. Go ahead and keep making games by all means, just, not with the godawful abomination that is Flash.

Re:Good Riddance

[westlake]

I expect Flash to be phased out in favor of non-proprietary alternatives in the near future(3-4 Years).

The HEVC/H.265 video codec is pretty far along now.

It will have the backing of the major hardware manufactuers and distributors like Netflix.

There is really no way of stopping new prorietary technologies from gaining traction on the web or keep them from being ported to the web as they gain momentum elsewhere,

Re:Good Riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

I try to make a living out of selling crack, and I can tell you that crack being illegal isn't very good for me.

Re:Good Riddance

[preaction]

Target AIR. Get mobile. Get desktop.

Now if only some organization would step up to partner with Adobe to continue AIR for Linux development.

Re:Good Riddance

[EdIII]

Find something new and quick. I suggest HTML5, and finding other tools to develop it in.

Adobe never wanted the death of Flash. They have gone through the 5 stages of grief already. Microsoft, in a little yellow school bus moment, ignored all the signs with their creation of Silverlight and went straight to "Fuck it. We were just kidding anyways".

There were a lot of factors that came together here and Flash simply cannot compete going forward with HTML5. Nobody really wanted a proprietary platform like Flash anyways, it was just all that was available at the time. You could stuff with Java, but that always seemed more geared towards business to me.

Adobe is moving on. While I don't like Dreamweaver (at all), and many developer friends state that the code it produces is lacking, Adobe can create some pretty nice development tools. Look forward to a pretty comprehensive HTML5 development products that you can make your games in.

P.S - It did not help that Steve Jobs refused to put them on Apple products towards the end of his life. Especially with games and content consumption. That was a bad hand dealt to Adobe that just quickened the death of Flash.

Re:Good Riddance

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

I don't know about him, but I have seen the writing on the wall. And I don't think I'll need any flash at all. No, Don't think I'll need any flash at all.

All in all it was just another stone in adobe's grave.

Re:Good Riddance

[webnut77]

Tung in cheek: Move to Silverlight.

Re:Good Riddance

[TheRaven64]

Adobe would be very happy for Flash to die. They make their money from the authoring tools, not from the player. The player is a money sink. With HTML5, they can outsource the client development to browser developers but keep the profitable one.

Re:Good Riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

errr umm.. without the player, there's no reason for anyone to use the authoring tools.

Re:Good Riddance

[assassinator42]

Isn't AIR based on Flash? Apparently they're still going to develop it for now, but I wouldn't trust that it will be around long-term.

Re:Good Riddance

[mrmeval]

Adobe has consistently and continually failed to make flash a safe platform for any computing device. I do need to use it for somethings but now I have it set up so I can run links in a virtual PC running as minimal a linux install as possible.

I removed flash from my phone as it's just a malware vector. It wasn't just malware doing evil, a game I paid for took control of my phone to show me a full screen flash ad. They later claimed the game must have not read the license key. They felt fine with abusing the free users trust and having a broken DRM mechanism.

Re:Good Riddance

[ewieling]

If you go for Chrome on Linux, don't get the 64-bit version -- it does NOT support flash.

Re:Good Riddance

[symbolset]

There is really no way of stopping new prorietary technologies from gaining traction on the web or keep them from being ported to the web as they gain momentum elsewhere,

Patents.

Re:Good Riddance

[arnoldo.j.nunez]

I know you say it playfully, but with Flash support phased out, how much does this really affect Linux users in the short term? It's not like websites will immediately start using new Flash features that are incompatible with the Linux flash player. I guess another question is how long is this "short term" period?

Re:Good Riddance

[maxwell demon]

Does not work on Linux.

Re:Good Riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

AIR? WTF?

TITANIUM.

Re:Good Riddance

[narcc]

You'll be fine. Adobe is phasing out Flash -- but in favor of Adobe Air -- on desktops and mobile.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Re:Good Riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

Not a problem. With the same toolset (Flash CS Pro/Flex) I can export Flash projects to iOS as a native app with a wrapper and am actually targeting iPhones & iPads with Flash.

Adobe's new roadmap for flash is to position it as the "premier game console" of the web and main video engine. I'm now looking more on creating standalone Adobe AIR (unsandboxed Flash) apps for iOS & Android Market.

With reduced resources (they just laid off a number of employees last Nov) and the inherent compatibility difficulties of porting to so many flavors of Linux, I guess they just decided to consolidate and let Google (with whom they've had a long partnership) do the job for them.

Re:Good Riddance

[Barefoot Monkey]

...unless their authoring tools output html5, of course. Which is what TheRaven64 was getting at.

Re:Good Riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

YouTube's HTML5 player still sucks eggs when compared to the Flash one.

The fact that one of the biggest advocates of HTML5 can't even create a feature-complete video player after several years trying makes you wonder if the average shitty website (e.g. slashdot) will ever be able to do it.

Re:Good Riddance

[Ucklak]

YouTube works without flash. That's one of the nice things about it. Forward compatibility.

Re:Good Riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

Only a fraction have html 5 counterparts.

Re:Good Riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

Vimeo works 100% without Flash

Or 0%, depending on whether your browser supports H.264 video or not.

Re:Good Riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

No, YOU wanted Flash to die. I don't care.

The millions of people playing *ville and all the other games on Facebook, Newgrounds and such? NONE of it would have been possible for the past 5-10 years if it weren't for Flash.

Only now has HTML gotten to the point where it can rival Flash in it's capabilities... and even now, there's more good / better looking flash content then there is HTML5.

Re:Good Riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

Except for all the videos with ads on them. And that's more than half. Once they get this sorted out, it'll be possible to use YouTube without flash.

Re:Good Riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are you executing Flash for some DRM some game developer put on his software? How will that change if you switch the game to HTML5? It'll equally fail to read the license key. Software faults happen occasionally, Flash is no different. You will have similar problems with HTML.

With all the sales of Google Play even with Google's Market License check, I still blame (and let the dev know) when I've been affected by DRM. Do I blame Google? No. I blame the software developer for using it. I've been stung at least 3 times in the past 4-5 months for license key checks -- one while I was in the middle of a game!

In the case of Flick Golf, I simply pressed Home to turn off wifi, then used the recent applications to get back. I was greeted by a "omg u pirate". Literally, 5 seconds away from the app to turn off wifi via the power control widget.

Re:Good Riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

yep nobody yet made better HTML editor than Adobe Dreamweaver and they had over 10 years to catch up

Re:Good Riddance

[EdIII]

Wow. What's with all the disguised butthurt?

What nobody wanted was a client side platform that was proprietary, had expensive authoring tools, and was run by Adobe, a company that clearly had no problem using FBI connections to imprison somebody over a Security through Obscurity issue and generally act like insane evil tyrants to protect their IP. It's not really that hard to figure out why a lot of people did not, and still do not like, Adobe as a company, or some of their products.

Everything you mentioned *could* have been made in a Java applet.. just a lot more painful I am sure.

Adobe had quite a bit of lock-in for so long simply because there was very little competition. Flash was killed by a move to develop websites without the need for proprietary software, a general move towards open source, and problems with bloat, stability, and security issues.

Yeah, Flash was about the only platform you could use in the past 5-10 years for a lot of stuff. Where was all the love and loyalty for Flash? I guess it never existed in the beginning and was merely a forced relationship....... Respect and loyalty is earned.

Re:Good Riddance

[bill_mcgonigle]

They make their money from the authoring tools, not from the player.

They've stopped licensing their video servers?

Re:Good Riddance

[TheRaven64]

Their video server can stream video to an HTML5-based player. And then Adobe doesn't even have to pay the license fees for distributing the H.264 implementation...

Re:Good Riddance

[tyrione]

A bit of history from this NeXT/Apple alumnus. In 1997 Carbon was brought to the WWDC in San Jose as a one year transitional API for the big boys to port their application base over to and then a rapidly phased move to Cocoa. Adobe, Macromedia and others dictated and delayed a lot of OS X maturity by threats to pulling their products from the platform. Microsoft was settling the legal dispute and contractually bound themselves to OS X but refused to go Cocoa.

Apple had no real leverage until iTunes and the iPod.

Instead of being ready when OS X was released for Cocoa apps these companies kicked and screamed all the way.

They whined even more after Carbon 64 bit didn't materialize. By then Apple had all the leverage they needed and when iOS materialized Adobe was the last and most arrogant one to believe Steve had any love loss left for them and their long-time collaboration from Apple->NeXT->Apple. When he publicly denounced Flash Adobe should have already had their app base moved to Cocoa. The days of complaining how difficult it is to maintain Windows and OS X finally fell on completely deaf ears. Adobe will never recover as a major player and will find itself relegated to a second tier if it doesn't make a bold push on OS X and iOS with actual native Apps from top to bottom that leverage pure Cocoa/GCD/OpenCL/OpenGL/CoreFoundation via C/C++/ObjC/ObjC++ in the truest sense of the world. Releasing PDF as an ISO standard was wise, but one done out of threats from competitors. Adobe still has bloated tools whose pricing is going to kill them faster than their competitors, but then again Adobe really seems to love bundles.

Re:Good Riddance

[petsounds]

Less terrible technology? Abomination?

Really now. I can respect an anti-Flash opinion based on a desire for open standards (even though the SWF format is open), but saying Flash is terrible tech is just me-too ignorance. What other web framework can you composite 2d animation, advanced typography, h264 movies, native sound processing, and a 60fps native 3D rendering engine at your leisure? Try making audiotool in HTML5. There's nothing better for creating multimedia content. There are simply no IDEs anywhere near as mature for HTML5. Actionscript 3.0 is a pretty great language, a bit like Java, that encourages good coding style, but without weighing down development speed with too much cruft. It's what Javascript could have been if Microsoft hadn't sabotaged the ECMAScript 4 deliberations.

And what other web framework has let developers deliver quality games? Unity, sure, but most people don't have the plug-in. Go ahead, what do you recommend that people should have used the last 10 years for web-based gaming? Yeah...I thought so.

Do I need to remind you that Epic recently ported the latest version of Unreal Engine to Flash? WebGL can't touch what is being done in Flash.

Even though Adobe is run by fucking morons, Flash is still a great platform, and they are not giving up on Flash completely. I imagine the future of Flash is more of a Unity-style thing where you develop in Flash and then export to various platforms. Epic wouldn't have spent the time and money porting Unreal Engine unless they had confidence in Adobe's roadmap.

As I said, if someone has philosophical differences with Flash as a platform, I can respect that. But all you people mouthing off about Flash without even understanding the issues only do more harm than good.

Re:Good Riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

Same reason no one uses Photoshop right?

Re:Good Riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

support for mobile flash wasn't withdrawn so don't worry!

they just decided to concentrate their efforts on AIR, the runtime that enables flash to publish apps, even to the ipad, where it's enjoyed a lot of success.

flash now has gpu support for its 3D, so when it comes to games it would seem that the future is particularly bright. also, the figures indicate that flash gaming is continuing to grow, while other gaming platforms suffer, eg consoles.

besides, flash has no real competition at all.
rather predictably, html5 has failed to take off, even in areas like video and gaming where you would expect it to do quite well.

if you've got any talent or ideas then you will make some money from games eventually! if not then try something else.

Re:Good Riddance

[preaction]

AIR is another runtime for SWF files that uses their ECMAscript VM, yes. More likely it's a wrapper with some add-ons, but I digest.

Long term meaning how long? 3 years? 5? 10? 20? Even 5 years is a really really really long time in the computer industry, and if things get really bad, there's always Gnash http://gnashdev.org/ and Lightspark http://lightspark.github.com/, which are good starts that could use some more love.

With what Adobe's been doing and saying, I wouldn't expect them to completely abandon the platform within 5 years, but I can't read minds. See: PalmOS, or Adobe's recent out-of-left-field announcements that makes one wonder if a chimp is pulling the levers on the board of directors.

One could liken it to Oracle's JVM and the other not-quite-implementations. There is an end-of-the-world scenario where the project survives. It isn't pretty, but it could work. And if all else fails, be prepared to switch technologies. Which, again, in the computer industry, you should at least keep in the back of your mind. I keep my "plan for nuking the world and switching to SDL" from getting too dusty.

Re:Good Riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

Reality: the world uses H.264.
You: Ooh, look at me! I'm making people happy with WebM! I'm the magical man from Happyland, in a gumdrop house on Lollipop Lane!

Re:Good Riddance

[kripkenstein]

Do I need to remind you that Epic recently ported the latest version of Unreal Engine to Flash [unrealengine.com]? WebGL can't touch what is being done in Flash.

They ported it, but how well does it run? Until we see the demo in the wild, so we can test it ourselves, I am skeptical. Their demo machine is likely not a typical one.

Re:Good Riddance

[petsounds]

See for yourself.

That's the Unreal Engine "Citadel" demo, running in Flash (you'll need 11.2 to run it) -- the controls kinda suck because I think they just did a quick port from the iOS version, but you'll get the idea. I don't think it's 60fps, but I assume that's an older build and still has debug code.

Re:Good Riddance

[kripkenstein]

Looks broken. Takes very long to load, then takes 600MB and something seems to happen, but no polygons are rendered. Looks like just one ugly repeating texture for the ground, and a few bushes. I can pan around though but there is nothing to actually see no matter how long I wait. http://imagebin.org/206217 This port doesn't look very successful.

Re:Good Riddance

[petsounds]

Strange, works for me on Mac OS X 10.6.8: http://imagebin.org/206224
What platform are you on? Sounds like perhaps bad driver support for your video card. :/

And I agree their demo needs some work. They need to implement texture/model streaming instead of forcing you to download the whole level up-front.

Re:Good Riddance

[kripkenstein]

Linux, NVidia drivers. 3D games and WebGL work perfectly here, so it isn't a problem with the hardware or drivers, must be something with their support I guess as you said.

Even if this ran, it took 600MB. That's huge, if it's ported from an iOS game it must take much less memory there. So I am very unimpressed by the quality of this port.

Re:Good Riddance

[petsounds]

Yeah...Epic threw the Citadel demo together last year to show at an Adobe event. I assume it's pretty early code and totally unoptimized. Still, those are PS3-quality textures and models, so the RAM footprint isn't going to be tiny.

This is what it's supposed to look like anyway, sucks that it didn't work on your Linux box: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZmFaxBhAo4

Re:Good Riddance

[shutdown -p now]

It's very hard to have any technology (proprietary or not) gain traction on the web when it needs to replace an existing solution in order to do so. It must not just be better - it must be significantly better, especially when the existing one is "good enough". It's precisely why HTML5 is struggling hard against Flash in video, and why it took ages for PNG to become a real standard on the web. But it also means that, once H.264 is set - and, largely thanks to Apple, it is a de facto standard for the Web already - it will be very hard to uproot.

Re:Good Riddance

[Trilkin]

You realize you're the scum of the earth, right? =(

Re:Good Riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

>Long post full of reasonable arguments.

I didn't read most of what you wrote, but you must be new here.

Re:Good Riddance

[m0n]

I may deserve that, but after graduating from the university to find most of all the good jobs are outsourced to India and China, I'm thankful to have a job.

Re:Good Riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

Even though Adobe is run by fucking morons, Flash is still a great platform, and they are not giving up on Flash completely. I imagine the future of Flash is more of a Unity-style thing where you develop in Flash and then export to various platforms. Epic wouldn't have spent the time and money porting Unreal Engine unless they had confidence in Adobe's roadmap.

Wut?

Epic didn't port anything, they compiled their C++ engine code into Flash ASVM Bytecode using Adobe's C++->LLVM->FlashCode compiler ("Alchemy"). A few tweaks to make the thing work passably after probably receiving a handful of money from Adobe to put one engineer on it for a month is not all that impressive.

Re:Good Riddance

[luther349]

guess you need to update your skill set to html 5 and java script. you can get the same results using that and be rid of flash.

Re:Good Riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is the issue. It's a giant security hole, and constantly spikes CPU usage....

Doesn't matter how good it "can be."

Re:Good Riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to be forgetting the part where, you know, Flash uses a ridiculous amount of resources, and is rather unstable.

It's all great that it's great to use for developers, but maybe you should consider what it is like for the end users - which are the people you are developing for in the first place.

Re:Good Riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

Youtube automatically fetches the HTML5 version if you don't have Flash installed, and you can enter the HTML5 trial so that the HTML5 version is always pulled up first at http://youtube.com/html5

No need for an addon.

Re:Good Riddance

[petsounds]

All you Anonymous Cowards sound like the slashdotters who still think Windows sucks as bad as Win95. Recent versions of Flash have made great strides in CPU consumption (after Adobe got a much-needed kick in the ass). Try 11.2 and tell me it still spikes on video playback. If you're talking about a page full of Flash ads, that's because ads are designed under the flawed assumption that they have 100% of resources available. I'm sure HTML5 ads, if we ever see those, will suffer similarly.

Re:Good Riddance

[Iskender]

All you Anonymous Cowards sound like the slashdotters who still think Windows sucks as bad as Win95.

I have a user name, what difference does it make? Doesn't make me any smarter.

If you're talking about a page full of Flash ads, that's because ads are designed under the flawed assumption that they have 100% of resources available.

Applications shouldn't access memory allocated to them, yet we still have memory protection. Some problems can't be helped but Flash makes it very easy to use resources while being a black box with minimal controls.

As for video performance...it might have improved, but I have a pretty good computer right now so I wouldn't have noticed. But I don't think it matters that much anymore: Flash has been annoying for very long and is still the same black box made by the same company. It's a source of security holes which is mostly used for ads and video, and it's not really trusted.

With HTML video capability the choice stands between playing video and playing video with flash. It ultimately becomes a worthless middleman in this application.

Re:Good Riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using a perl script called youtube-viewer that fetches the video and plays it with mplayer. It's not perfect, but it runs higher def videos without choking (bad with Flash, sadly worse with HTML5), handles playlists much more nicely, and there's no dealing with Youtube's incredibly awful layout.

Re:Good Riddance

[PiSkyHi]

I am using 64-bit chrome on Ubuntu 11.10 with flash.

Re:Good Riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

Just start a grow op, like the other honourably unemployed.

Re:Good Riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

You could save the .flv, then watch it locally with a non-flash media player.

Re:Good Riddance

[Trogre]

From my experience, Vimeo works about 5% with Flash, unlike YouTube.

Re:Good Riddance

[tlhIngan]

...but not on Slashdot, which just rolled out a Flash-based feature.

Which I find completely infuriating since it doesn't load half the time I want to use it... why couldn't they use YouTube, which makes it instantly work practically everywhere? Hell, my TiVo has YouTube so I can watch long videos on my nice big-screen!

A couple of months ago, they withdrew flash support for mobile, and now for Linux.
it's like Adobe wants the death of flash.

It's because Adobe was spending a lot of money on Flash player and they still couldn't reach a very large market - iOS. Steve Jobs killed flash by not allowing it on iOS, and everyone else's "It has the full web" wasn't enough to sustain its development. Sure Android had it, but it ran crappily and appeared to be basically a checkbox feature "runs Flash" (instead of "runs Flash well").

iOS users didn't complain because most of the web still worked - YouTube videos played, Vimeo videos played, etc. There were a lot of Flash games that didn't, but they often had native apps that supported native OS features (Farmville addicted loved how Farmville notified you when it was ready, something the Flash version wouldn't be able to do).

The biggest loser would've been Flash ads that everyone blocks anyways, which losing those isn't a big deal on iOS, and Android users never activated them as well.

I suppose the continuous abuses of Flash to spread malware and super cookies soured the public on it. And the continuous maintenance of Flash required by Android users (it took a little while for the Xoom to finally get Flash player, ditto ICS). Adobe was hoping that iOS users would petition Apple to allow Flash, but in the end the only thing they ended up allowing was a Flash compiler to native iOS apps. Probably supports Android now, too.

Re:Good Riddance

[Macrat]

Vimeo works 100% without Flash, unlike YouTube.

Huh?

http://www.youtube.com/html5

Re:Good Riddance

[santosh.k83]

Me too, but the 64-bit version of Chrome for Linux is not bundled with Flash. Instead it uses the system-wide Flash plugin that's installed, which now that Adobe will not be supporting, will get increasingly outdated. The 32-bit version however comes bundled with Google's own version of Flash.

Re:Good Riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

Adobe's grave?
Surely you must mean Flash grave, because I don't see Photoshop, Illustrator, etc going anywhere.

Re:Good Riddance

[Yvan256]

Ever tried to actually use YouTube with HTML5 only? Half the videos (those with ads) won't work.

Re:Good Riddance

[Syberghost]

So does Adobe.

Re:Good Riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

But not in Firefox. or Opera.

Re:Good Riddance

[Macrat]

Ever tried to actually use YouTube with HTML5 only? Half the videos (those with ads) won't work.

Yes, 100% of the videos I watch on YouTube are with HTML5. Never had a single issue watching a video.

Re:Good Riddance

[PiSkyHi]

True, and from the article: "Google will begin distributing this new Pepper-based Flash Player as part of Chrome on all platforms, including Linux, later this year."

Re:Good Riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

By 100% you mean, "only about 30% of videos play"? This is a weird definition of 100%.

Re:Good Riddance

[blacklint]

Moonlight works (but only as a Firefox plugin?). However, DRM isn't / can't be implemented, so it's useless for Silverlight's main use (aka, Netflix).

Re:Good Riddance

[Yvan256]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyhV4oLOHEg&feature=fvst
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4-p3ZGlThg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuD7W6XUS2s&feature=related

All of these display a black area with the message "This video is currently unavailable".

I could sit here all day long and give you a list of hundreds videos that give the same error message, these are not hand-picked videos, this problem is on nearly 50% of the videos on YouTube.

And I never had a single problem on Vimeo.

Re:Good Riddance

[rtb61]

Which all points to the benefit of using open source. Instead of people shooting from the hip and complaining the should read and understand.

Here's a lovely little wikipedia article on Google Native Client http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Native_Client.

You will find it is a open source client, cross platform and of course can readily be incorporated in Linux.

This is basically exactly what we all want really to happen. Open source modules incorporated into an open platform, with core programs open source and as for the rest as proprietary as producers want them to be. So Adobe has done the right thing and Google has done the right thing and everyone benefits.

What's the bet it'll be the M$ofties that complain the loudest juts so they can try to make Adobe, Google and Linux look bad.

Re:Good Riddance

[Anonymous Coward]

"godawful" "abomination" you sound like republicans (spewing lies, don't know what you are talking about). I think it is a great platform and I have yet to see anything do the job as well. However, thanks to Mr. Jobs (RIP), we are now spending lots of money to have it removed from our business web site and replaced with various crap that so far can not compete with the quality afforded users with Flash.

Re:Good Riddance

[bbtom]

"HTML5 ads"

HTML5 is just HTML, y'know.

HTML5 ads are things like text and banners. You know, not godawful eyesores with background music and punch the fucking monkey bullshit.

Re:Good Riddance

[omnichad]

They sure can be. You add Javascript to it, and you can do all the things you describe. They just use Flash because it's easier. If flash is gone, expect CPU-sucking HTML/Javascript based ads.

jedie

[Anonymous Coward]

fuck flash

Re:jedie

[Anonymous Coward]

He's too fast for you... unless you're talking about Flash Gordon....

OS alternative?

[Anonymous Coward]

How close are we to an open source alternative that actually works for most flash tasks (in other words, that will let me reasonably use Kongregate and Youtube)?

Re:OS alternative?

[alexgieg]

For YouTube, just enable the HTML5 experiment. No Flash needed.

Re:OS alternative?

[meist3r]

This is not yet an alternative at least not for all users. I'm using Lubuntu and Chromium on a netbook and a very old PC and on both systems the playback with the HTML5 player is choppy and the sound recently stutters and lags. Up until about two weeks ago any version of Chrome and Chromium would simply crash all the video tab renderers on loading the YT HTML5 player. Also other sites like revision3.com won't even begin to display content in HTML5. There is some serious work to be done across platforms to make this a viable alternative. I've been begging for flash to die for years but if this is the near future I have to consider getting a windows install just to watch internet videos or (semi-legally) download even more video source files which is inconvenient.

Re:OS alternative?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just so. The HTML5 direction is great and all, but it's nowhere NEAR a replacement for Flash on the internet yet. Many sites don't even support it. Flash is still the only alternative for a great many sites, and even on Youtube where HTML5 is an option, it's not really ready for prime time yet.

This is bad news for Linux.

Re:OS alternative?

[tqk]

How close are we to an open source alternative that actually works for most flash tasks ...

These work fine for what I do (Debian):

i browser-plugin-gnash - GNU Shockwave Flash (SWF) player - Plugin for Mozill
i A gnash - GNU Shockwave Flash (SWF) player
i A gnash-common - GNU Shockwave Flash (SWF) player - Common files/libr

Re:OS alternative?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is bad news for Linux.

Not it isn't. Apple have thrived without it for years, so will Linux (i.e. Android). Stop being a wet-blanket.

Re:OS alternative?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm using Lubuntu and Chromium on a netbook and a very old PC and on both systems the playback with the HTML5 player is choppy and the sound recently stutters and lags. Up until about two weeks ago any version of Chrome and Chromium would simply crash all the video tab renderers on loading the YT HTML5 player. Also other sites like revision3.com won't even begin to display content in HTML5... I have to consider getting a windows install just to watch internet videos or (semi-legally) download even more video source files which is inconvenient.

Second World problems.

Re:OS alternative?

[jones_supa]

Here's a link to a MPlayer YouTube script which also allows playing on the fly. It uses youtube-dl as a helper to fetch the exact video location URL from which MPlayer starts buffering.

Now we just need a Firefox/Chrome extension to make a nicely clickable button which passes the browser URL to the script. One problematic thing here too is that while MPlayer can seek, it does seem to not know the length of the video, so I don't know the current position.

Re:OS alternative?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple and Android has thrived without it (not really "without" for Android) for years because every second website now has an app. It's really annoying sometimes when the site greets you with something to the effect of "Our mobile version sucks! Go install our app!"

Compare and contrast to the bullshit "Everyone will just use the browser and HTML5 in our happy-happy future!"

Re:OS alternative?

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that only works for some videos...and doesn't work for any video that has ads.

Re:OS alternative?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I guess I don't get the grumbling because web sites on phones and small form factor slates just suck terribly. You want to click a link, but there are three of them stacked up and you want the middle one. Good fucking luck hitting it the first time with a finger or thumb (touch input). Sometimes you even zoom the thing up reasonably and still the damn thing won't hit the right one. Try using something like IMDb on a phone. The app rocks. The web site sucks. The difference is that the apps make use of the space and layout of a small form factor screen and the touch input that they support in a much better way. They don't expect precision input like web sites (which are designed for precision of a mouse or ergonomic mouse replacement).

Re:OS alternative?

[TheRaven64]

so will Linux (i.e. Android)

Android is not losing Flash support, only desktop Linux / Mozilla / X11 is.

Re:OS alternative?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because YouTube coded it that way, it's not a problem with HTML5 itself. YouTube = Google = ads. That is the problem.

More people should switch to Vimeo, ALL of their videos play fine without Flash.

Re:OS alternative?

[Anonymous Coward]

Easy for you to say who is not dependent on sites that still use flash for example video playback.
This would not be a bad thing if most sites used html5 or similar, but that is sadly just not the case.

Now if i want to use these sites i will be FORCED to use chrome. Why is this a good thing??

Re:OS alternative?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just enable html5 experiment?? It does not even support this for most videos yet. Even with html5 enabled most videos will still use flash.
And there are plenty of other sites i use that does not use html5 at all.

Re:OS alternative?

[Anonymous Coward]

And how is your 3D performance? Pot commiserating with the kettle here - I use old hardware too, so I don't intend to be mean by pointing out that perhaps you should upgrade, at least if you 'want it all'.

Linux video support has dropped a number of otherwise nice cards - you can run the open driver, but at vastly reduced & often spotty performance. I've got a tidy stack of once-useful cards that are now only good for retro-gaming on 98 and XP.

That's a shame, just like it's a shame all that nice G4 hardware became landfill, but we have to accept that while Linux has good backwards compatibility, it's not perfect backwards compatibility. If you want to do everything most people can do, you'll have to use the hardware most people use.

Re:OS alternative?

[Mindcontrolled]

How close are we to an open source alternative that actually works for most flash tasks?

About ten years behind before you'll get a buggy working copy of the state of the art of last decade, as usual in the FOSS movement.

Re:OS alternative?

[symbolset]

Well I'm kind of tempted to develop a mobile slashdot app. Because on mobile /. is that bad.

Re:OS alternative?

[geckipede]

More people should switch to Vimeo, ALL of their videos play fine without Flash.

I disagree. I have a 1GHz machine with 512MB RAM. This machine can play youtube videos just fine using their flash player - smooth and at reasonable resolution. The youtube HTML5 player is a bit worse, stutters a bit, but is generally not awful. Vimeo videos are browser locking slideshows.

Re:OS alternative?

[Anonymous Coward]

Instead of a dedicated extension you can use Greasemonkey to add a button and register a protocol to call the script.

Re:OS alternative?

[narcc]

That's more of a problem with the touchscreen only interface than anything else. An optical trackpad takes all the pain of hitting small targets away -- no unnecessary zooming required.

Re:OS alternative?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mr. Crabby Pants at it again.

Re:OS alternative?

[tyrione]

Oh yea! I'm using a Pentium Pro and therefore have a right to complain that my decades old set up somehow is relevant to today's demanding new standards.

Re:OS alternative?

[madhi19]

Yeah you might as well ask when GIMP is going to catch up with Photoshop. It ain't happening folks! Don't get me wrong I love and almost exclusively use the GNU Image Manipulation Program but the project is hurting for support.

Re:OS alternative?

[archont]

Yeah and it's called HTML5.

Re:OS alternative?

[shutdown -p now]

Or browse any website with an embedded YouTube video on iPad.

Re:OS alternative?

[shutdown -p now]

The difference is that the apps make use of the space and layout of a small form factor screen and the touch input that they support in a much better way.

That's no good excuse for making an app, because a website can make use of space and layout of a small screen just as well - all tools necessary to make such adaptive websites even without browser sniffing have existed for ages, and there are plenty of high-quality mobile websites designed using those tools and working great on smartphones.

Re:OS alternative?

[westyvw]

As apposed to windows? May not be buggy, but its slow and crappy, and not near state of the art. Typical of the Microsoft movement.

Re:OS alternative?

[jones_supa]

Thank you for the tip. :)

Re:OS alternative?

[antdude]

Do they work with all Flash sites out there especially games and videos like Hulu, Vimeo, YouTube, DailyMotion, etc.?

Re:OS alternative?

[tqk]

Do they work with all Flash sites out there especially games and videos like Hulu, Vimeo, YouTube, DailyMotion, etc.?

YouTube, yes, never any problems. I've never been to any of those others. I've used YouPorn and PornHub also (just to test them, you understand :-).

This's on both Debian stable and testing, and both boxes are AMD CPUs. Some videos can lock up the browser or confuse sound, but restarting the browser sorts it out every time.

Re:OS alternative?

[antdude]

Bah, restarting web browser? Annoying. :P

Re:OS alternative?

[tqk]

Bah, restarting web browser? Annoying. :P

It doesn't happen often, but it happens. Besides, Firefox is smart enough to be able to restart opening all tabs just like they were, so you don't lose anything but the time to restart. Take a bathroom break or pour another cup of coffee.

Re:OS alternative?

[antdude]

Bah. Still annoying. :P I wonder how often it crashes compared to Adobe's Flash. Flash seriously crashes my Mozilla's SeaMonkey v2 web browsers too much on all of my computers! Heh.

I'll never forget...

[Zapotek]

...where I was when I heard the news. So long...

Google Chrome for Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess people needing Flash whilst web browsing will need to use Chrome on machines that lack Flash.

Re:Google Chrome for Linux

[gstrickler]

All of my machines "lack" Flash, except the one built into Chrome. That includes my Mac and Windows machines, also, not just my Linux machine. Of course, I don't consider that to be a problem, it's deliberate.

Re:Google Chrome for Linux

[gstrickler]

Grammar lesson. I said Mac and Windows machines (plural) and Linux machine (singular). No self respecting "sad fat linux creep" would admit to having only one Linux machine, nor to having multiple Mac and/or Windows machines.

Your attempt at trolling is a fail.

How will this affect users?

[steevven1]

Will Linux users get totally screwed over by this over time, or are there plenty of alternative, non-Adobe plugins to display Flash? How big of a deal is this really? I'm a 100% Linux user, but I can't live without Flash in today's world, unfortunately.

Re:How will this affect users?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a 100% Linux user and I never install Flash. Not even Gnash.

Re:How will this affect users?

[Ephemeriis]

Honestly, it hasn't been that big a deal for a little while now. Like it or not, HTML5 is supplanting Flash in a lot of places.

Personally, I see this as less of a ding against Linux than an admission that Flash just isn't that important anymore.

Re:How will this affect users?

[hendridm]

As much as I think Flash is *way* overused on the Internet, I would miss it. I watch some videos, though not that much - but when I want to it's nice to have. I also play online games to kill time which I don't NEED, but like. I generally hate Flash, but sometimes you need it. Fortunately, Chrome is an option.

Re:How will this affect users?

[realityimpaired]

Fortunately, Chrome is an option.

Unfortunately, there's no other option. Even Chromium doesn't have native Flash support on Linux (about half of the videos on Youtube will gak saying that you support for the video format requested).

Re:How will this affect users?

[icebraining]

I use youtube-dl for most videos. It doesn't do streaming, but it doesn't need Flash!

Re:How will this affect users?

[Anonymous Coward]

As much as I think Flash is *way* overused on the Internet, I would miss it. I watch some videos ... I generally hate Flash, but sometimes you need it.

And that's the real kicker - you don't need Flash to watch video. Flash is just one method of wrapping video codecs, and at the outset, Flash video was just an add-on hack. What advantage does it offer? Reflective control buttons?

Forget Flash. Digital video can and will survive without it.

Re:How will this affect users?

[Anonymous Coward]

Adobe made it clear that Linux support for 11.2.x will continue for another five years. That's a really long time for anything related to online issues. HTML5 development is moving along nicely, as is support for other Flash alternatives like Gnash and Lightspark. I don't think this whole Flash in Linux issue is anything to worry about. Plus, you can always stick with whatever browser you prefer and just use Chrome for Flash-specific content.

Re:How will this affect users?

[Mindcontrolled]

That's kinda the Linux movement in a nutshell - look! our crippleware works after installing libbullcrap.3.57.so! Well, kinda, can't stream, but hey, who needs that. And you wonder why Linux is not on the desktop "yet"?

Re:How will this affect users?

[diego.viola]

I'm a 100% Linux user and I never install Flash as well.

Re:How will this affect users?

[icebraining]

No, I don't wonder and I don't care. If you want streaming, use Flash. I'm just telling what *I* use.

Re:How will this affect users?

[markdavis]

Of course, it *is* important that we can *control* our browsers and that is simply not possible with HTML5.

At least with Flash, we could block objects if we wanted, or block all of Flash. With HTML5, extremely annoying animation and video is taking over sites and browsers and we have zero control over it all.

We desperately need some type of Firefox addon that allows the user to control how much, if any, animation and sound is present, easy way to block stuff by default or by choice, and limit CPU and other resources taken by javascript threads.

And no, "noscript" doesn't cut it.

Re:How will this affect users?

[Skapare]

Well, for VIDEOs you don't need flash. Never did. Of course SOME websites intentionally obfuscated the videos to force you to decode them in flash, but that's not REAL VIDEO. REAL VIDEO has worked for ages without any need for flash. Flash was made to overcome failures of Microsoft IE to deal with video.

Re:How will this affect users?

[fnj]

I use youtube-dl for most videos. It doesn't do streaming, but it doesn't need Flash!

Thanks for that! It looks like a valuable tool and a valuable learning instrument.

Re:How will this affect users?

[gottabeme]

Limiting JavaScript resource usage would be nice (but extremely complex). But I think that with NoScript and AdBlock one should be able to remove HTML5 animation, video, and audio, right?

Re:How will this affect users?

[markdavis]

If you have nothing but tons of time and experiment forever, yes.

But for everyone else, noscript is going to simply break all modern websites. We need something far better. Something that gives users easy control over what they see and resources used. And do this with minimal breakage of sites and without the user a being a compsci major.

It is possible. I have even had some ideas- mostly centered around limited tight javascript loops designed to short-circuit animation. But it seems there is just not much interest in the community.... yet. I am hoping that will eventually change.

Re:How will this affect users?

[Anonymous Coward]

don't worry company i work for is already working on publishing tools that would guarantee you see HTML5 ads (if you block ad using ad-block or some other way you block content also) actually its easier to force people to see your ad on HTML5 than it was when we used flash for ads as soon as all browsers support HTML5 functionality needed for ads, flash ads are history, there will still be one invisible flash component to provide flash cookie for ad "just in case" but ads themselves are moving to HTML :)

Re:How will this affect users?

[gottabeme]

I think the only hopes we have are community-maintained blocklists and generic blocking rules or surrogates. I don't think it's practical to have JS controls fine-grained enough to disable animations, because in the end page elements can just be repositioned, and then you're going to have to disable JS, period.

Maybe our only real hope is using sites that don't do stuff like that.

Re:How will this affect users?

[paskie]

When I have no flash (or do this remotely), I watch or listen to youtube videos streamed using

mplayer `youtube-dl -g youtubeurl`

Re:How will this affect users?

[slimjim8094]

Sorry, but Real Video never worked. :p

Re:How will this affect users?

[icebraining]

Nice. I just found out you can use pipes too:

youtube-dl -q -o - URL | mplayer -

Re:How will this affect users?

[luther349]

chrome will still have it.

Re:How will this affect users?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, look, streaming.

Re:How will this affect users?

[westyvw]

Ever ask windows if it understands a codec? It goes, looks, and cant figure it out. Typical of the crap fest that is windows.

Re:How will this affect users?

[Anonymous Coward]

one update to flash-for-windows that isn't backwards compatible could kill sites like hulu on linux (unless you use chrome) that use flash for content delivery and encryption (drm)?

would not surprise me if google was paying adobe to do this.. drive linux users to chrome..

how long will it take opera, firefox, etc. to implement a "pepper" api to use the flash out of chrome?

Re:How will this affect users?

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL, you actually think you'll win the cat and mouse game between advertisers and ad blockers, I really don't see how you can get around blocking ads at the domain name level unless you serve ad from the website the user is visiting, and even if you did I'm sure someone will figure out how to block them anyway.

That said, I don't mind ads so long as they aren't intrusive, so long as they are completely static and don't take up half the page they are ok with me. I don't use an ad blocker, however I still use noscript and because advertisers are too stupid/lazy to make ads which don't depend on Javascript or Flash it means I don't see 99% of ads anyway.

Re:How will this affect users?

[Anonymous Coward]

there's still flash for a moment with security/bug fixes.. lets just hope we can copy/symlink the plugin from google chrome to the other browsers.

Re:How will this affect users?

[Man Eating Duck]

When I have no flash (or do this remotely), I watch or listen to youtube videos streamed using

mplayer `youtube-dl -g youtubeurl`

This is neat, thanks a lot! I had a look at youtube-dl a couple of years back, but it didn't cut it as a downloader. Guess I didn't consider the -g option. I just dropped a script called 'yt' in my path:

#!/bin/bash
mplayer `youtube-dl -g $1`

yt <paste url> now plays videos perfectly, it even seeks transparently without caching the whole thing.

Flash will diminish in importance, good for HTML5

[Chrisq]

Flash won't be supported in Linux, and isn't supported on IOS. If anything this will be e good boost for HTML5

Time to celebrate...

[gstrickler]

Adobe kills Flash for Linux. - "This is supposed to be a happy occasion. Let's not bicker and argue about who killed who."

Re:Time to celebrate...

[Kjella]

The day it reads "Adobe kills Flash" I'll pop the champagne, "for Linux" just means support is going backwards for Linux. No matter how much you hate Flash the effect will be "That doesn't work on Linux/Firefox, use Windows/Chrome." because despite it being supported I bet once Flash 12 comes out most sites will reply "your version of flash is not supported, please upgrade" anyway. Anyone know if this support will be in Chromium too or if it's another Chrome-only feature like H.264?

Re:Time to celebrate...

[__aaqvdr516]

This post makes me want to
sing.....
sing.......
sing...........

Re:Time to celebrate...

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop that!
Stop that!

You're not going to do a song while I'm here.

Re:Time to celebrate...

[Truekaiser]

it's not going to be in chromium. chromium is chrome without those google specific features.

Re:Time to celebrate...

[Yvan256]

I do not view this as a negative for Linux, I view this as another reason why we should not use Flash.

Re:Time to celebrate...

[drinkypoo]

I do not view this as a negative for Linux, I view this as another reason why we should not use Flash.

It's both.

Re:Time to celebrate...

[Anonymous Coward]

I do not view this as a negative for Linux, I view this as another reason why we should not use Flash.

It's not your opinion that matters, only the people in charge of building the web sites.

Re:Time to celebrate...

[Skapare]

The day it reads "Adobe kills Flash" I'll pop the champagne, "for Linux" just means support is going backwards for Linux. No matter how much you hate Flash the effect will be "That doesn't work on Linux/Firefox, use Windows/Chrome." because despite it being supported I bet once Flash 12 comes out most sites will reply "your version of flash is not supported, please upgrade" anyway. Anyone know if this support will be in Chromium too or if it's another Chrome-only feature like H.264?

Actually, the communication should go in the other direction and say "Use Web Standards!". Then their videos will work on all modern browsers.

"We don't need no steenkin Flash!"

Re:Time to celebrate...

[Skapare]

Oh, you mean the ones that have no clue how to use and conform to Web Standards, and just build a mashup with junkware?

Re:Time to celebrate...

[yuna49]

Who is the "we" here? Developers or end-users? As one of the latter who watches Flash videos on a subscription site (Crunchyroll), what would you suggest I do if they move to Flash 12? Give up my subscription? Use Windows or Google Chrome?

You all may hate Flash, but it remains the most widely-used cross-platform method for distributing video. Someday everything will be using HTML5, but that day isn't happening any time soon. In the meantime, Linux users may or may not be able to watch video on the thousands of web sites that use Flash today. Certainly if I were running a site that uses Flash for videos, I wouldn't be spending money converting to HTML5 just to support a few Linux users.

Re:Time to celebrate...

[fnj]

Look, Adobe moving forward will not be further developing flash support for linux. That doesn't mean existing plugins magically stop working. Even if they take the downloads away, we've already got working plugins we have already downloaded. I know I'm not throwing mine away like a trained money. It doesn't need any fancy installer. It's basically just a huge but simple .so file you drop into the plugin directory.

It's clear that Adobe isn't going to be doing much more with flash on any platform. Simple maintenance and security (hah!) fixes on Windows and OS X, probably, for not much longer. I doubt they'll do anything to break compatibility, and even if they do, web developers are rapidly losing interest in flash anyway. None of them would bother to use any new gee-whiz crap junk. The day that anybody cared has passed. The fact that there is no iOS support for flash is the death knell for flash. And since linux is not a toy operating system, I am not worried much about newly uncovered security exploits. Worst case, I'll just sandbox my flash browsing under a dummy user. No exploit is going to be able to do anything outside that user account.

There's also gnash.

Re:Time to celebrate...

[Yvan256]

If someone is still using Flash in 2012 to deliver videos on the Web, they're probably encoding into H.264, which is supported by HTML5. It doesn't matter what fairytale stories you read about WebM, H.264 won the fight before it even began, it's used everywhere in the production chain and in commercial products for the last five years or so.

Windows, OS X, iOS and Android can all play H.264, most probably hardware-accelerated on top of that. It's not my fault if Firefox developers and Opera can't get their head around the concept of calling OS APIs to play the video.

Re:Time to celebrate...

[Nimey]

Oh, I'm a lumberjack and I'm okay...

Re:Time to celebrate...

[gstrickler]

I quote MP and get rated 5 - Insightful? I'm not complaining about being modded up, but I think it's a bit more funny than insightful.

Re:Time to celebrate...

[elashish14]

So you're saying Flash kills Adobe for Linux?

Re:Time to celebrate...

[gstrickler]

Well, it's more like "Adobe chokes Flash for Linux". It's not dead yet.

That didn't last long

[damn_registrars]

How many versions of flash had Linux releases? Maybe 10, 11, and 12? That hardly even qualifies as a token gesture in my view.

Re:That didn't last long

[GiMP]

Actually, there was a Linux flash player since version 6... The support hasn't always been good or well-synced with the Windows/MacOS releases, but it has existed for quite a long time. 64-bit support has only been available since version 10 or so.

Re:That didn't last long

[Alan Shutko]

It's at least been since Flash Player 9 in January 2007. 5 years is more than a token gesture.

If Abobe won't support Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Then it's time for eminent domain over their imaginary property rights. Or at the very least, anonymously reversed engineered alternatives.

Re:If Abobe won't support Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Why the hell would you even want to spend resources to reverse engineer a piece of shit such as Flash ?
Just LET IT DIE. The more Flash is kept alive, the more those stupid Flash developers will continue to infect websites. Eradicate the disease at the source. Kill Flash, Ignore Flash but don't invest (in any kind of way) in it.

Re:If Abobe won't support Linux

[mysidia]

Why the hell would you even want to spend resources to reverse engineer a piece of shit such as Flash ?

Because the "POS" Flash is still better than the POS called "Java applets"

Re:If Abobe won't support Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Who even uses Java applets in this day and age ?
For Pete's sake not even my bank uses Java for home banking.
Applets and Flash belong to the past, you need to get on with the program mysidia.

Re:If Abobe won't support Linux

[Skapare]

You don't need either to do what the vast majority do with Flash, which is play videos (which Firefox has been able to do without either of those for at least the past 10 versions). I don't have Flash or Java working in my browser (which, BTW, is just a little over a year old, now), and videos set up by smarter webmasters work fine (yeah, HTML5 standardizes it in a distinct way, but it's also doable the old object way).

Re:If Abobe won't support Linux

[mysidia]

You don't need either to do what the vast majority do with Flash, which is play videos

You the user don't really have control of whether the sites you want to visit use Flash or not. Flash commonly gets used for splash screens, navigation, and video players.

The fact your browser supports HTML5 doesn't do you much good for sites that require flash.

But potentially the fact that Adobe is abandoning cross-platform status for Flash may be a big win for Microsoft Silverlight and Oracle Java; for interactive rich websites.....

Re:If Abobe won't support Linux

[Skapare]

Of course as a guest of a website, I don't have the access rights or authority to make it a stupid site. Ultimately, the owner/webmaster makes those decisions. I can lead a horse to water, but I can't make him drink.

Splash screens are just stupid. It's easily doable with Javascript. Just load the splash as a background and default all the other nodes off-screen. Then when the JS is done loading, move the other nodes on-screen. And this is a chance to do some silly thing like sliding them into place from the far side away from them. There's probably a way to do it without JS to some extent.

HTML5 isn't even required. Firefox can do videos without it. Sure, it's a little more work for the webmaster. But I've watched videos that "just work" way back on FF 2.0. I don't know hoe much effort the webmaster did to make that work, and maybe it was a lot. But it did work. And there was sound, too. And I didn't install any plugin.

Using Flash for navigation is the utmost of webmaster stupidity.

The fact that Adobe is dropping Linux support for Flash may really indicate the reduced importance of Flash, and the fact that they have another means to do things through Chrome, so they have at least some excuse to give to Linux users (however few they may be). It is now more widely know as unneeded for video (it never was needed, but lots of people just didn't have a clue without some tool to do it for them and the early tools used Flash).

Features

[Nerdfest]

I'm not sure this is actually a loss. I think it's probably a bonus that they'll only be doing fixes and not adding more features. The new features are not likely to be used and generally only end up adding more potential exploits.

Re:Features

[recrudescence]

If that's what they mean by "withdrawing support", then yes. But I don't think that's what they mean.
From TFA: "Adobe will continue to provide security updates to non-Pepper distributions of Flash Player 11.2 on Linux for five years from its release".
And then, nothing.

Re:Features

[icebraining]

I don't think Adobe is expecting Flash to last that long. They're already releasing HTML5 authoring tools to prepare ground.

Re:Features

[Anonymous Coward]

so how come adobe have just invested a small fortune getting gpu 3d support to work, along with epic and unity?

sounds like you need a few licks on the head with the reality bat!

Yay!

[Anonymous Coward]

Now for them to stop releasing it on windows and everything else!

So flash can GO AWAY. Bloated ass useless ad serving slow pos infecting the web and our hardware!

Re:Yay!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm on windows and for the lat 4 years I haven't had flash installed.
No problem, good websites still work, youtube with the html 5 works although not for all videos.
Its good enough for me. Stupid websites that use flash as home page or worse that are designed 100% in flash were never visited even when I had flash installed.
Ok Adobe, when are you killing Flash on windows ? That would really be a good gesture. And as for the poor flash developers ? Who cares, go learn HTML 5 and design nice, browsable websites.

Re:Yay!

[Anonymous Coward]

So ads will be served with JS, <canvas>, <video> and <audio>, that's all. You're conflating vehicle with contents.

BTW, which browsers allow blocking execution of just specific <script> elements on the page? I know for sure Opera can do that with user JS/extensions, FF's NoScript seems to be able too, but what about Chrome and IE?

P.S: I'm only wondering which will be the next biggest vector for malware in the future. My bet is on the pluggable DRM modules for audio/video, seems like The Media is pushing for it.

Re:Yay!

[mrnobo1024]

I used to think of Flash as a CPU hog, but it pales in comparison to Javascript/HTML5. Even simple 2D games in Javascript will run at about 3 frames per second despite constantly using 100% CPU, and they often hog memory too (which Flash has never been all that bad about in my experience, unless you leave a dozen YouTube tabs open or something).

Annoying ads won't go away just because Flash does; they'll move to HTML5 and will be just as annoying, more resource hungry, and harder to block (disabling Javascript everywhere makes the Web unusable; a whitelist system like NoScript is going to be a necessity).

Re:Yay!

[robmv]

Some of those games are not using a newer API like requestAnimationFrame. After it is more widespread, currently Firefox and Chrome, I expect some limitations will be added to setTimeout

Re:Yay!

[TheRaven64]

I used to think of Flash as a CPU hog, but it pales in comparison to Javascript/HTML5

You're comparing apples and oranges there. You are not comparing Adobe Flash to JavaScript + HTML5, you are comparing Adobe Flash to an (unspecified) implementation of JavaScript + HTML5. This may seem like nitpicking, but it's very important. For example, on OS X Safari is a lot faster than FireFox for anything involving lots of compositing, but on Windows the converse is true.

More importantly, the people who get the blame for poor performance can actually fix it with HTML5. When Flash was slow on OS X, people blamed Apple, but Apple was a small share of the market that Adobe didn't care about, and Apple couldn't do anything to fix it. Adobe has very little incentive to improve Flash performance - they don't make money selling the client. In contrast, Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft, and Google all use their JavaScript performance as a selling point for their browsers. If a Flash game is too slow on a user's machine, what can they do? Not play it. Unless they actually tell the author, they may not realise that they've lost a potential user. If they do, will the author pass the complaint to Adobe? Probably not. In contrast, if a web game is too slow in Firefox, the user can try it in Chrome. If it's faster, then Firefox probably just lost a user...

Re:Yay!

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the biggest reason Flash sucks so hard on OS X (compared to Windows) is Safari's plug-in architecture. Adobe even proposed a new standard for browser plugins, but Apple of course doesn't give a fuck.

(Prior to OS X 10.6, Safari would grind to a halt playing animated GIFs, much less Flash.)

To the rest of your post, nobody has yet created a html5 game that's more complex than the shit Flash developers were churning out 10 years ago. The proof is in the pudding - HTML5 is slow.

Re:Yay!

[markdavis]

I am glad your posting is already modded up to the max.

My experience with video or complex javascript and html is that it is even MORE of a CPU hog than Flash, regardless of which browser.

And at least I USED to be able to BLOCK Flash completely, by default, or by object if I so chose. Now with HTML5/Javascript replacing it, there is no reasonable way to control CPU usage of the browser or limit annoying animation or sound.

Noscript is completely useless for "normal" people or "normal" browsing. You can't just turn off Javascript or nothing anywhere works. And trying to "pick" which parts need to be blocked so you can actually read a site without 2/3 of it moving around and sucking your battery dry is nearly impossible.

A new type of Addon is needed, desperately, to give users much more control over browser resources.

Re:Yay!

[maxwell demon]

The proof is in the pudding

I've just eaten the pudding. There was no proof in it.

Re:Yay!

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the biggest reason Flash sucks so hard on OS X (compared to Windows) is Safari's plug-in architecture.

[Citation needed.]

Adobe even proposed a new standard for browser plugins, but Apple of course doesn't give a fuck.

[Citation also needed.]

Last time I read what Adobe had to say about the matter, they thought that Apple had a solid plugin API, but their issue was that they also had to support Firefox, Opera, and Chrome, and those browsers hadn't consistently or fully adopted the newer plugin APIs, so they were stuck designing to the least common denominator.

(Prior to OS X 10.6, Safari would grind to a halt playing animated GIFs, much less Flash.)

That means.... exactly nothing relevant here. Animated GIFs weren't played through a plugin. That problem was simply a very dumb animated GIF decoder. Animated GIF is a streaming format with no index, so a decoder must decode frames sequentially. Normally that's OK -- decode the entire sequence once, cache the decoded frames as you go, and you're done. But in the interests of memory efficiency, Safari didn't save frames. And even worse, it didn't retain state from one frame to the next. To display frame 17, it always had to decode frames 0-16 first, even if it had just gotten done displaying frame 16.

That approach works OK for small frame counts, but obviously falls over on its face doing tons of needless extra work for anything even moderately long.

To the rest of your post, nobody has yet created a html5 game that's more complex than the shit Flash developers were churning out 10 years ago. The proof is in the pudding - HTML5 is slow.

And because it is so today, so shall it always be! (In your mind.)

Re:Yay!

[luther349]

windows and mac seems to be all that's left. but with the massive shift to mobile and tablets taking place in the pc markets that may be there death nail.

Re:Yay!

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, sorry, WRONG.
Flash works POORLY on OSX due the API's Apple exposes to them. Flash, as we know, works very well on Windows. And as such we know the code is good. BUT it working poorly on OSX is because the API that Apple exposes to Adobe for including Flash in the browser was very poor. This issue effected ALL browsers. (No matter who made it). Only recently has this improved, but Apple had started its "Kill Flash" propaganda before that was available.

Please, you ignorant people who keep blaming Adobe, DO YOUR HOME WORK. Flash is a good technology for what it does and how easy it is to program, and for what was the only truly cross platform Web technology that WORKED. Yes we have HTML5 now which is basically a copy of FLASH and all the technologies Flash pioneered. However, HTML5 is, like all committee based technologies (And also based on not just one technology, but a handful, Javascript,CSS) a dogs breakfast compared to a technology designed by a single company with a single vision. (Why is OSX better then Linux for example).

Flash will likely not ever go away, it has to many advantages developers like, ie, taking 1/3 the time to develop a tool that works. There are very good reasons why Flash became so dominant. And those reasons have not gone away. The only different is that you have many propaganda driven ideas about it that Steve Jobs put in your head. Ideas that also hold true for HTML5. What happens when you get what you want (HTML5) and realize the world is even a worse place..
Go into a dark cave and stay there I hope..

Re:Yay!

[TheRaven64]

Flash works POORLY on OSX due the API's Apple exposes to them

How does this nonsense get repeated? Flash needs:

• Video decoding and playback in a layer
• 2D vector drawing in a layer
• 2D raster drawing in a layer
• Compositing layers

OS X exposes APIs for all of these, and automatically offloads the compositing and video decoding to the GPU where possible. Flash doesn't use them, it implements its own crappy (unaccelerated) compositor. In 10.6.4, Apple introduced the APIs that Adobe asked for (which were a stupid idea - they allow you to decode video frames on the GPU, then move the data back across the bus, composite in software, and then move the result back across the bus for the final rendering, which is what Flash actually wanted to do). The result? Flash is still slow.

There is simply not excuse for the fact that VLC used half as much CPU to decode exactly the same H.264 video file as Flash on OS X. QuickTime used even less if you put the video in a .mp4 container instead of .flv. Flash wouldn't use the QuickTime decoder, which would have cut their CPU usage in half for things like YouTube. The Flash developers claimed that was because they needed to composite things on the resulting video. The problem with this argument is that you can use a CGLayer as a rendering target for a QuickTime movie and then composite that layer over or under any others, all via supported APIs.

I did a series of video lessons to accompany one of my books and the publisher put them together using a Flash thing. On my Core 2 Duo, it was only just useable. I rewrote their application in Cocoa, using the standard compositing and video playback APIs, and CPU usage dropped to about 20% of one core. And, yes, this did include things like compositing video over static backgrounds and then compositing text over video.

Flash, as we know, works very well on Windows.

No it doesn't. It just works marginally less badly than it does on OS X.

Re:Yay!

[Anonymous Coward]

Which books are those and who published them? I can say I am the president of the United States online too you know. I'd also like to note that writing books is not the same as actually doing the job professionally and having degrees to go with it in the computer sciences. Lastly, flash works well in Windows, despite your 1 sided b.s. and I am another user stating it here as well.

Linux, not all computers guys...

[Anonymous Coward]

Reading through the comments here I see a trend. Adobe is giving up on Linux for now. It was Steve Jobs personal vendetta that kicked them off of Apple products for now. He is gone. Apple is already going against his wishes in several regards

I agree, this looks like Flash is on its way out. That is likely a good thing. However, it is too soon cheer yet. This is just McDonalds pulling out its branch at a vegan colony.

Re:Flash will diminish in importance, good for HTM

[Anonymous Coward]

Desktop Linux is not a large enough market to have any significant bearing on the importance of Flash.

Antiquated storage

[unixisc]

One problem I've always had w/ Adobe Flash - regardless of platform - is that the storage that one can set aside for a downloading video is at the most 10MB, and after that, one's only choice is unlimited. There is no way I'm going to select unlimited, but in this age of TB of HDD and GB of RAM, it's really antiquated of Adobe to have nothing b/w 10MB and entire disk. Least I expect from this is to allow 1GB of HDD to be allowed, so that the downloads are faster.

I happen to use Safari/XP to watch YouTube, and the trouble w/ HTML5 is that if my DSL connection gets interrupted, which it frequently does, the video stops downloading, and only the portion that's been downloaded to that point keeps looping. This is a ridiculous behavior of the browser - for such things, it should either flush what's there and restart, or continue downloading from where it left off.

And not...

[Anonymous Coward]

... a single f*** was given that day.

Time for a Linux - Apple alliance

[recrudescence]

As a linux user hearing these news, I'm reluctantly joining hands with Apple in saying "Yeah? Well, screw you adobe. And screw you google. We can do better!"

Re:Time for a Linux - Apple alliance

[Anonymous Coward]

And screw you google.

Why? I thought Google was a strong proponent of HTML5 to replace Flash. I thought Google was a strong proponent of the WebM format to replace Flash video. Isn't Google one of the good guys here?

Re:Time for a Linux - Apple alliance

[fnj]

Adobe has basically already screwed THEMSELVES. Royally so. From their own decisions over the years. And google is basically just an advertising company. That's their revenue stream. They can't pull out of their other more interesting ventures such as Google Labs fast enough. It's pretty sad, actually.

Re:Time for a Linux - Apple alliance

[elashish14]

You want to ally with Apple to stick it to Adobe? Foolish play my friend. Have you noticed how Apple has responded to it's Linux-based competitor in the mobile arena?

Make no mistake - Apple would like Linux to die as much as Microsoft would. I'd think Adobe would prefer as much as anyone else for a FOSS OS to win out so they would never have to worry about being strung up by Apple/MS like a puppet.

Re:Time for a Linux - Apple alliance

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple is way more dangerous for free software than Adobe will ever be. An alliance with them would be extremely foolish, and will not happen.
Besides, Flash is dead. Five years of support is years more than Flash has ahead.

Re:Time for a Linux - Apple alliance

[paulatz]

Actually from TFA:

plan will see the elimination of 700 jobs, mostly in North America, as the software-maker changes its focus from software to research and marketing investments in digital strategy

Which means that they plan to fire all their engineers and programmers, stop actually producing anything and instead make money with "marketing" and "digital strategy". I wonder if there will be any adobe in 3 years

yeah, go away flash!

[Anonymous Coward]

I want useless flashy gadgets in HTML5 so they're even slower and harder to disable!

Re:yeah, go away flash!

[Anonymous Coward]

I want useless flashy gadgets in HTML5 so they're even slower and harder to disable!

What is 'harder' about disabling javascript? Only garbage websites don't work properly without javascript (hello slashdot commenting system).

Re:yeah, go away flash!

[mrnobo1024]

Only garbage websites don't work properly without javascript

I agree. But unfortunately, Sturgeon's Law applies - 90% of websites are garbage, so if you want to use the web you'll have to go "dumpster diving" (enabling JS) a lot.

Re:yeah, go away flash!

[maxwell demon]

What is 'harder' about disabling javascript?

It is harder because now both wanted and unwanted stzuff will be in JavaScript. While up to now it was easy to enable functionality on trusted sites by enabling JavaScript while keeping most unwanted stuff away by disabling Flash, now both wanted and unwanted stuff will all use JavaScript, making selectively disabling unwanted stuff much harder.

50 $ for flash support

[delete2kill]

adobe always charges 50$ for support over the phone for any problem with flash player on windows , but has never supported linux over the phone i used to work for them

Pepper API

[monkeyhybrid]

Can't other browsers just adopt the Pepper API?

Re:Pepper API

[monkeyhybrid]

Ok, to partly answer my own question, it seems Mozilla is not interested in adopting it.

Re:Pepper API

[Lussarn]

I think Mozillas stance on this Pepper/NaCL thing is quite bad founded. What Google have done is essentially to technicaly sandbox plugins (giving them about the same security as Javascript) and with that made a new and improved plugin API. This is not a bad thing. It of course might keep developers from HTML/JS and instead use C/C++/Any language you can think of. I really don't see how this is a bad thing either. It's pretty much proven by now that HTML/JS will never get native speeds, Chrome already have it. Compare Airmech on chrome with that mozilla MMORPG released this week and you will see for yourself. Airmech looks modern, the Mozzila game is a litte better than NES quality.

Re:Pepper API

[robmv]

The problem with pepper is that it is a code dump, now moved to the chromium repository, it isn't an spec, behaviour changes every time Google updates it. If Mozilla were to waste waste resources to allow more closed plugins infect the web at least gives them a spec, if every browser embed the same code, then why have different browsers?

This is the same reason why WebQL died as an standard, the spec said: must follow Sqlite version x.y as the SQL dialect., or something like that. Mozilla and Microsoft rejected that because it force an implementation

Re:Pepper API

[quetwo]

Yes, they can. And believe it or not, Mozilla was at the table creating the standard that became Pepper API. They just didn't want to implement it...

Re:Pepper API

[Skapare]

Apparently, from commentary I've read in a number of places (no, I did not actually analyze the API myself), it is a poorly designed API. Or maybe this is the overlooked gem amongst the sewage of junk APIs being made these days.

Protocols actually work better than APIs ... at least once you get someone designing it that has a brain. And protocols are better positioned because they make it easy to separate processes to improve security and isolate bugs to avoid more overwhelming crashes (if the plugin is buggy, then just the plugin crashes instead of the whole application ... just code the application to deal with an unexpected closure of the communication channel). THIS is one of the IMPORTANT reasons I no longer bother to even look at new APIs anymore. APIs are so 2nd millennium, anyway. Protocols (with tiny tweaks) can work over networks as well as Unix namespace sockets (the tweak is that you get more information via named sockets, like the userid of the other process ... and hence better security). Or the main application process can launch a process to run the plugin with and use a socket pair to communicate. And protocols are more portable (just use network byte order if passing data in binary form when you need to avoid XML or JSON processing overhead).

Re:Pepper API

[utkonos]

How does google implement the API? It seems to me like google-chrome is a single binary. The Adobe Flash Player would be distributed as part of the binary. How is this actually a plugin if you can't "unplug" it so-to-speak and have the Flash plugin as a discreet file?

Re:Pepper API

[utkonos]

What I'm getting at here is if it is distributed with Chrome, can't we just download Chrome, and if Firefox implemented the API just use the Chrome plugin with Firefox? Basically reversing the way it is now. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the current Flash plugin a Firefox plugin that works through Chrome's implementation of Firefox's plugin API?

Re:Pepper API

[gottabeme]

Yeah, but apparently Mozilla isn't interested in implementing Pepper.

Re:Pepper API

[Skapare]

If someone wants to implement capabilities as a monolithic system, then so be it. Their time, their decision. Their project, their decision. What I am saying is that if you WANT plugins, a protocol is a better way to do it than an API. If you do NOT want plugins, then don't do a plugin API or protocol. Duh!

Re:Pepper API

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with pepper is that it is a code dump, now moved to the chromium repository, it isn't an spec, behaviour changes every time Google updates it.

It is clearly not a code dump, because you can see every commit as it lands in a open repository.

The chrome team could have taken a spec to a standards body. Standards bodies are notoriously slow for open ended problems. The ones that are not slow want two implementations before ratifying the spec. Building a working system as part of an open source project was the smart way to build something good quickly.

If Mozilla were to waste waste resources to allow more closed plugins infect the web at least gives them a spec,

A spec no one has implemented is inevitably wrong. The only way to get a working spec is to build a prototype.

if every browser embed the same code, then why have different browsers?

That statement is so incoherent that I don't know how to respond.

Re:Pepper API

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there something stopping Firefox from implementing the PPAPI? Perhaps this could become a new standard API for browsers across the board?

Pepper isn't open source.

Re:Linux is dead on the desktop.

[Anonymous Coward]

> non - ZERO

sorry, should read "none - ZERO", not non.

Re:Flash will diminish in importance, good for HTM

[gQuigs]

According to statcounter:
February 2012:
"iOS",1.89
"Linux",0.83

February 2011:
"Linux",0.76
"iOS",0.46

If iOS gets to have an effect, I don't see why desktop linux can't. In this case however, it seems like it would mostly hurt Firefox on Linux. But then again this is in 5 years. 5 years ago, there were a lot more sites with Quicktime, Realplayer, and Windows Media streaming. I barely see them at all today.

Value

[tessellated]

One of the top causes for my netbook's fan to become noisy.

And nothing of value was lost.

Re:Value

[TheRaven64]

I don't mind so much now, but when I was in my old house I found Flash very useful in the winter. I'd start a random Flash game when I got up in the morning and my laptop would quickly become nice and warm...

Re:Value

[Trogre]

A pity for me, as me and my kids like playing Flash games without caring about what platform we're on. My laptop fans only get noisy when I need them to, since Flashblock takes care of all unwanted Flash content. I don't recall the last time I saw a Flash advertisement.

Google inserting advertising content into YouTube streams is, IMO, much more nefarious and difficult to block.

Re:Value

[The Wild Norseman]

Google inserting advertising content into YouTube streams is, IMO, much more nefarious and difficult to block.

Just use a comprehensive hosts file. I put together a hosts file from

http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm

and

http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/

these two sites (I chose them randomly one day) and I have never once seen a YouTube pre-video advert. In fact, I'm so used to not seeing them that I'm always -- always -- surprised to see them when I'm at a friends house or another computer other than my own.

HTH

the rise of Chrome

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the rise of Chrome. The downfall of Mozilla, good bye Netscape!

Re:Linux is dead on the desktop.

[Anonymous Coward]

Since you managed not to mention the actual database, you must be saying that Linux desktop users are not interested in a tool for use with SQL Server?

Surprise, surprise.

Re:Linux is dead on the desktop.

[SteveFoerster]

They're called "other countries", and in some of them, desktop Linux use may not be a majority, but it's more than a rounding error.

Re:Flash will diminish in importance, good for HTM

[mysidia]

If that's true, then why did Adobe create Flash for Linux in the first place?

Re:Linux is dead on the desktop.

[Anonymous Coward]

A survey of 75 people is now the definitive way to determine OS usage? I hope that rock you are living under is nice a comfortable.

Next!

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out, flash.

Herpes, you're out next!

---

By the way, 100% cotton white on black "Fcuk you Adobe" t-shirts are available in small, medium, large, tallboy and "geek sits on his fat ass in front of the computer all day surfing pr0n and reading /." sizes for a very reasonable price of just $11.99 each (minimum quantitty:1 Gross - fap! fap! fap! [he said titty!] fap! fap! fap!) at ThinkGeek all this week only!

Why not ask your mom to buy you one?

and thanks for?

[s-whs]

I'll never forget...
...where I was when I heard the news. So long...

and thanks for all the 100%-CPU-use times?

Re:and thanks for?

[Anonymous Coward]

And BSODs and complete system hangs. Those where the most enjoyable when the distorted squeak filled the headphones and file systems were mix'alot.

Re:and thanks for?

[leromarinvit]

and thanks for all the 100%-CPU-use times?

Sadly, that's one of the features HTML5+JS has already copied. Firefox uses 100% of one CPU core for several seconds at a time regularly when loading and displaying large and JS-heavy sites, and I use Flashblock, so it can't be crappy invisible Flash applets. Yes, my laptop is old, but a 1.6 GHz dual core should be more than enough to browse the web.

Re:and thanks for?

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember that Flash is an easy entry for low quality developpers. It's all about optimisation and best practices. You can easily get 100% in ANY programming language around if you can't code properly. Anyone can do a badly optimized banner ad ;)

Re:Linux is dead on the desktop.

[tqk]

It's no surprise to me that Adobe doesn't want to support a market that's no more than a rounding error. Ok, sure, there are 4 basement dwelling slashdot nerds using desktop Linux, but you don't matter. You four do not constitute a significant market.

I don't suppose it's ever occurred to you that whatever you choose to use on your box doesn't matter in the least to us? Whether you want or don't want to use Linux is utterly irrelevant to me. I don't care.

Enjoy your malware and exorbitant licensing costs. No, I don't want to fix it for you when it breaks.

Just make HTML5 usable

[jones_supa]

For video, it would help a lot if someone wrote a solid HTML5 player with the simple YUV overlay playback, just like the stand-alone video players, which are fast. Works on every PC.

Re:Just make HTML5 usable

[serviscope_minor]

For video, it would help a lot if someone wrote a solid HTML5 player

Yeah--video playback stinks on Flash and HTML5.

My netbook can juuuuuust about decode 720P H.264 in realtime and can confortable decode 1080p Mpeg2 in realtime. Flash and HTML 5 in firefox struggle playing 240p, and get jerky on 320p. Unscaled, so no excuses about overlays.

  Downloading the 320p videos and playing them in mplayer barely registers in MPlayer, even when not using overlays to display.

Re:Just make HTML5 usable

[Skapare]

Why not download the 720p or even the 1080p videos when the intent is to use mplayer. I know mplayer can handle them because I've done it.

Re:Just make HTML5 usable

[gottabeme]

It's too bad that Firefox apparently doesn't fall back to system components for video (e.g. GStreamer, libvlc, mplayer). There are some plugins that do so, but whenever I've tried them, they always had bugs that made them unusable. Maybe with Mozilla's new, pragmatic H.264 approach, something like this will happen so video decoding won't depend on Firefox itself.

Re:Just make HTML5 usable

[jones_supa]

Unscaled, so no excuses about overlays.

Even unscaled the YUV overlay helps a lot, as the YUV->RGB colorspace conversion is then done by the GPU with its dedicated circuitry instead of CPU.

Overly dramatic

[Anonymous Coward]

The news sound s a bit more dramatic than it is. Adobe is continuing to support Flash on Linux for the next five years. Plus any browser which implements the Pepper API will be able to run the newer versions of Flash (those that come after 11.2). This is really a big non-issue, at least for the next five years. By 2017 hopefully Firefox, Opera, etc will support Pepper.

Re:Overly dramatic

[Skapare]

Damn! You mean I still have to wait 5 more years?

Isn't this good for Gnash?

[jonwil]

Is there any reason the Gnash team cant step up and improve Gnash and make it as good as Flash? Or at least good enough that it can be a drop-in replacement for Flash?

Does Gnash support RTMPE streams? Maybe what is needed is a fork of Gnash (or a bolt-on for Gnash) hosted in a country without anti-circumvention laws that supports RTMPE and other flash DRM. (similar to how many projects have had and continue to have sites outside the US for the development and distribution of encryption software to avoid strong US export controls)

Re:Isn't this good for Gnash?

[Anonymous Coward]

Good for Gnash? That would be ending the project. Gnash if fucking embarrassing and piss poor.

Bad Decision

[Anonymous Coward]

They think saving a few bucks from making a Linux version is a good idea? Developers use Linux. You piss off those people, and they make damn sure Flash gets replaced even sooner with HTML5 than expected.

Not really true..

[quetwo]

Adobe will continue to make new versions of the Flash Player that use the new PEPPAPI (Pepper API). They will no longer make any new versions of the plugin that support the older NSAPI model. PEPPAPI was created by Mozilla and Google, but since PEPPAPI was introduced, Mozilla decided to not support it ("it is too hard").

I was about to say to stop the bad summaries, but this is /. , and this is what we have come to expect.

Re:Not really true..

[Anonymous Coward]

No they won't. Google will produce those plugins and is ultimately responsible for them.

GPL it

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps they will GPL it and let the community maintain it?

Re:GPL it

[Skapare]

OH GAWD NO!!! ... let it DIE! ... bury IT! ... pour concrete over the grave site!

Replace flash now

[chr1st1anSoldier]

You can replace flash for a couple of big sites right now with FlashVideoReplacer on mozillla. I have been using it for about a week or two now and it's not too bad. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/flashvideoreplacer/

Re:Replace flash now

[yuna49]

No Hulu, no go.

Re:Replace flash now

[aloniv]

You can replace flash for a couple of big sites right now with FlashVideoReplacer on mozillla. I have been using it for about a week or two now and it's not too bad.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/flashvideoreplacer/

Linterna Mágica is better than FlashVideoReplacer as it works with more browsers (Midori, Epiphany) and supports more websites (e.g. Dailymotion).

Re:Replace flash now

[chr1st1anSoldier]

Thanks for sharing! I downloaded Linterna and I'm checking it out right now, so far so good.

Re:Flash will diminish in importance, good for HTM

[rainmouse]

If that's true, then why did Adobe create Flash for Linux in the first place?

Sometimes people make thing for Linux without need for large profit. It's good PR and helps the community; However, for most people, when you do something for free and find the recipients to be largely rude and ungrateful, you stop doing it.

Good riddance!!!

[wfstanle]

Adobe, your web programs (Flash and PDF Reader) have been a pox on computer users everywhere even if they are not aware of the risks. I hope you will entirely give up on the Internet and concentrate on software where they will do no harm. Better yet, just leave the business entirely.

Re:Good riddance!!!

[mark-t]

I have yet to see any pdf reader other than Adobe's that will work properly with the PDF's that this company produces.

I have no real dedication to Adobe one way or the other, but I seriously do like that company's map products, many of which utilize several more advanced pdf features such as layers for customization.

If somebody would make an open source pdf reader that could actually handle such PDF's, I'd drop Adobe like a hot potato... it's the only 32-bit application I have on my 64-bit linux system, and the only reason I even have the 32-bit compatibility libraries installed.

Fuck adobe

[Anonymous Coward]

Adobe needs to get hacked, or let someone infiltrate them and steal all their flash-work. Then we can improve upon it ourselves. Don't release something and make people depend upon it, just to dump it in the river. You're begging for some trouble.

Re:Linux is dead on the desktop.

[Anonymous Coward]

No offense but, your potentional customer base that uses linux on the desktop, apart from being not interested in your windows-only solution, already use a full FOSS version of software with the same functionality.

Now please go away, MS marketing troll, with your made-up statistics. The 3 other nerds here in my basement agree.

Full screen blocky with Intel GPUs

[jones_supa]

Hmm, while we are at the subject, I have a quick Windows Flash question. I have recently experienced an issue where with Intel chips (GMA950, X3100) on various machines, the full-screen video looks blocky (it's not anti-aliased but scaled using the nearest-neighbor algorithm). Do you know how to fix this? Is the problem in the display driver or the Flash plugin? The "Enable hardware acceleration" is ticked in Flash and tinkering with the system tray Intel GPU settings tool does not help either. The sites I experience this with are YouTube and areena.yle.fi (but probably applies to all video).

Android is losing Flash support

[Anonymous Coward]

According to Adobe:

http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2011/11/flash-focus.html

Looking forward

[utkonos]

This move was not unexpected. We've been hearing things to this extent for a bit now.

This leaves a few questions. First of which is:

Are the open source alternatives ready for prime time? Correct me if I'm wrong but here is the list of the major alternatives:

1. Gnash
2. Lightspark
3. Swfdec

4. 1. I've included Swfdec, but as I understand it, this is for flash apps that you have created and know work with swfdec. It is not for random content from unknown sources. A use case for this is a kiosk where you control the content and the display.

      Now, are the other two, Gnash and Lightspark, ready for primetime, i.e. can they replace Flash Player any time soon?

      Personally, the last time I used either one was a few months ago when I toyed with the idea of trying to make my workstation fully open source. I found that many youtube videos made the plugin crash for both Gnash and Lightspark.

      Since there is content right now that is made for Adobe's Flash Player, I feel that the way forward should be to stop creating new content for Flash. Let it die, and only create new content in HTML5. As for the existing content, the alternatives like the ones listed above need to be able to play need to be able to play it with no problems. I would even have no problem if there was new content developed with the alternative in mind rather than close source Flash Player.

Re:Looking forward

[Skapare]

Video has been natively supported by Firefox for at least the past 10 versions or more. And in the past 8 versions it used web standards to do so. What else is Flash good for that an app can't do better?

Re:Looking forward

[gottabeme]

Sounds like Lightspark is not:

https://github.com/lightspark/lightspark/wiki/Site-Support

Re:Looking forward

[Anonymous Coward]

Lightspark is being very actively developed now, look at all these commits http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~a-pignotti/lightspark/lightspark/changes/3353 Gnash still does not support AVM2, so it's slowly becoming more and more irrelevant. Swfdec is long time dead. None of them are ready for prime time.

Re:Looking forward

[Anonymous Coward]

My browser keeps crashing when I use gnash on Linux. Which flash plugin should I use to avoid crashes?

Re:Looking forward

[Skapare]

I suggest the null plugin. It's what I use. Doesn't crash.

Re:Looking forward

[tepples]

What else is Flash good for

Accessing the camera and microphone. There still wasn't a widely implemented device API in HTML5 last time I checked.

that an app can't do better?

Unlike with a native application, you don't have to be an administrator to use a web application or an SWF application.

Re:Looking forward

[Anonymous Coward]

I would like to have a open source flash plugin that was designed to be able to fail without crashing the browser. That would be a killer feature.

Re:Looking forward

[Anonymous Coward]

Swfdec was always meant for any random Flash file from the Internet. It's just been a lot more careful about what is possible. And even though its code hasn't been touched in over 3 years, I still consider it the best Free Flash player by leaps and bounds even today. For example, it was the only Free player to ever play Youtube flawlessly - but Youtube's player evolved and that was that.

I can tell you that there is not a single person that cares about a Free Flash player. The only thing people care about is something they can use to do Flash right. So they will take a working closed version over an almost working Open version. And that means nobody is going to help anyone developing until until it's done. And then the help won't be needed anymore.

It's why I stopped developing Swfdec and started doing something people find useful instead.

Benjamin

Re:Looking forward

[utkonos]

Actually, I've found that it is not the plugin's problem here, it is the browser's plugin crash handling that is to blame. I can say that for as many versions back as I can remember since I started using Chrome, a plugin crash has never ever crashed the browser. It crashes the tab that is using the plugin, but you just close that tab and try again.

What browser are you using that crashes from a plugin crash?

Re:Looking forward

[utkonos]

Well, Here's an example: Newgrounds.com. Flash games out the wazoo. In direct answer to your questions: Flash can run Orgasm Girl better than an app.

Re:Looking forward

[utkonos]

Doesn't look good. Is the problem that Flash is a moving target? Or is it difficult to reverse engineer features? I would imagine that getting the DRM right in Lightspark would be impossible, no?

Flash dropping support for

[FudRucker]

all browsers except chrome on the Linux platform wont make me switch browsers, i will just do without, and say fuck you adobe and fuck you too google, i dont need either one of them

Yeah, well fuck you too.

[Ptolom]

A combination of html5 and bittorrent will replace you crap quite satisfactorily.

Pepper API

[utkonos]

Is there something stopping Firefox from implementing the PPAPI? Perhaps this could become a new standard API for browsers across the board?

BSD just called

[Anonymous Coward]

I heard laughter, a loud "Hah Hah!", and then the line went dead.

Re:BSD just called

[TheRaven64]

Why? The only Flash version on BSD in the past has been the Linux version in Linux ABI-compat mode. No Linux version means no BSD version either.

Mozilla definitely won't support the Pepper API

[Anonymous Coward]

Josh Aas (Mozilla Corporation) 2012-03-23 11:26:00 PDT
removed Whiteboard: Revisit decision in 2015

are there any html5 porno sites yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Xhamster.com and youjizz.com both use flash, anyone know of flash free ways to fap to streaming video?

Re:are there any html5 porno sites yet?

[Skapare]

Just rip the sites and feed it all to your own streaming server ... content wants to be shared.

Re:are there any html5 porno sites yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

redtube

Re:are there any html5 porno sites yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

xhamster has a mobile version with html5. It works on your ipad.

Great news...

[mr_lizard13]

Great news for Linux users. A pretty nasty piece of malware has now been eradicated.

Millions of iOS users show you are wrong

[SmallFurryCreature]

Sorry, Apple (crosses himself to ward of the evil one) has shown that Flash is overrated. Adobe itself already acknowledged defeat on that front and stopped development for mobile devices. Those lucky Android devices that got flash support have it crash or slow the device to a crawl. The mobile device on which regular web pages make sense, tablets, seem to give Android no advantage at all in sales.

Adobe is really shooting itself in the foot here again. Web development is my trade and I have noticed a very high adaptation of Linux in this industry. Not just the obvious servers but desktops as well. A few years ago, if you wanted one, it was a negotiation. Now, I have even seen it as a requirement. Flash is universally despised in the LAMP development area which also seems (but I admit to being prejudiced) to be the place where new things are attempted rather then the 1 millionth intra-net site.

Will this make a huge difference? Not at first but unless a customer absolutely demands flash, I code a requirement in HTML5 and show something that is smoother and better supported and Hey, works on the iPad. So much easier for the initial demo to just hand a tablet to show how nice the site works... especially if you noticed the customer has an iPhone or iPad themselves. And a lot do. I am not convinced the world is moving to the tablet for browsing but the customer does so demoing the product on the product of the future just seems smart to me.

When the iPad (or was it the iPhone itself) launched, a lot of people like the parent claimed that the lack of flash would kill it... I would like a product that gets killed like that. I would dry my tears with million dollar bills.

Adobe got lazy with flash, it is slow, buggy, a resource hog and crashes every two seconds all so that webpages can't be indexed and look like the creation of a 12 year old Japanese girl. It lost support of the people who are capable enough of working around it and now, thank to the evil one, customers are demanding that their site works without it to.

HTML5 is the new thing and with mobile devices becoming bigger and bigger (who would you rather please with your website, an iPad user or a user running IE6, I think I know the bigger sucker... eh, the customer with more disposable income) the finicky, slow websites must go. Have you tried YOUR websites menu with a touchscreen yet?

Re:Millions of iOS users show you are wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

-1, Overemphatic rant

But, really, choose one - it's either Flash sucks or stopping all Flash support (in just short 5 years) is a bad thing.

And AFAIK Adobe was working on HTML5 tools for some time now, including Flash -> HTML5 exporter.

Oh, and last I checked mobile browsing share was still in single digits with few percent growth since last year.

Re:Millions of iOS users show you are wrong

[archont]

> Not at first but unless a customer absolutely demands flash, I code a requirement in HTML5 and show something that is smoother and better supported and Hey, works on the iPad. So much easier for the initial demo to just hand a tablet to show how nice the site works...

Not sure if you're joking or not..

javascript animations aren't smooth - they're clunky and ugly everywhere I see them. A friend recently showed me http://beetle.de/full/ - made using HTML5 and JS. The idea of scrolling the website is pretty neat actually but the performance and overall experience is pretty bad. Javascript actually reminds me of Flash 5 or 6 with the default framerate set to 20.

And in terms of possibilities it's not far beyond that really. Despite what you're saying it isn't faster than flash either - the VM is slower, rendering is slower, canvas for 3d rendering is slower..

If you wanted to write an application to do some serious client-side computing you go with Java or Flash. But since Flash is just so much more convenient it's the tool of choice. Since mobile devices weren't the hottest thing as they are not nobody optimized flash for low-powered devices. Hell, nobody optimized at all - there was plenty of CPU cycles to burn on desktops. You can make flash work fine for mobile devices - AIR is the practical implementation - however you need skilled developers (and only in the past 4 years or so have those risen to prominence among Flash users) and focus - actually design with those devices in mind.

Flash is buggy, true, but so is HTML5+JS. They're buggy in different ways - with Flash development is a breeze - the application always runs the same everywhere. No need to detect different user agents and serve workarounds for broken CSS implementations, no juggling of tags that one browser supports and the other doesn't. Embedding fonts, animations, importing various assets and creating a small self-enclosed application is faster and easier than it is in JS+HTML5, which is why I'm kind of reluctant to go back to that mess called JS (my last serious HTML development days were in 2005).

  It must be said that about 80% of problems with flash stem from badly coded applications. Memory usage, lockups, crashes, low framerate, bad design ect ect. As a webdev you should know serious flash websites don't actually embed the content but load it dynamically - which means adding a text-only version for crawlers is trivial. As is deeplinking, support for back/forward buttons - but all of that came pretty late in Flash's lifecycle, unfortunately much later than it became technically possible.

For the record I'm a flash developer in Poland. Haven't seen anyone asking about iPad compatibility.

Re:Millions of iOS users show you are wrong

[elashish14]

Adobe got lazy with flash, it is slow, buggy, a resource hog and crashes every two seconds

This is true of EVERYTHING made by Adobe. Name one product that they make which is resource efficient. You can't. This is yet another reason it's good for them to die. On many machines (my own included), Flash is the last piece of closed binary crap installed. It'll be welcome getting rid of this beast.

That said, we desperately need a royalty-free codec to gain large-scale adoption. God save us all

Re:Flash will diminish in importance, good for HTM

[Beelzebud]

Oh so that's why they dropped it. Big Bad Linux was mean to poor little Adobe, so they took their ball home after having their fee-fees hurt.

Capitulating to Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2011/11/flash-focus.html

"However, HTML5 is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively."

2013 - Year of the Linux Desktop

[Arrepiadd]

Desktop Linux is not a large enough market to have any significant bearing on the importance of Flash.

Ah but you see, next year it will be the year of the Linux Desktop and it will all change!

Re:2013 - Year of the Linux Desktop

[Chrisq]

Desktop Linux is not a large enough market to have any significant bearing on the importance of Flash.

Ah but you see, next year it will be the year of the Linux Desktop and it will all change!

Yes everyone was waiting for Gnome 3 and Unity

Re:2013 - Year of the Linux Desktop

[symbolset]

I'm a just leave this here.

Re:2013 - Year of the Linux Desktop

[jd2112]

And Windows 8.

only security and bug fix updates???

[Anonymous Coward]

Really, is there any other kind of update for flash?

Flash is a complete POS, and the #1 attack vector for browsers (pdf & java close behind). On the other hand, too many websites rely on it, so banning it entirely from my company would likely lead to a revolt.

If Adobe cared, they could develop decent software with decent security. But they don't.

Re:Linux is dead on the desktop.

[Anonymous Coward]

Enjoy your malware and exorbitant licensing costs. No, I don't want to fix it for you when it breaks.

Basically no malware and no exorbitant licensing costs over hear in OS X - land. Come on it; the water's fine...

And no bitching about having to buy a Mac.

1. This is /. A significant percentage of those reading my words wouldn't let a technicality like Apple's polite "Do not steal OS X" - style "DRM" stop them from building a Hackintosh.

2. For 80-90% of use-cases, a $600 i5-based Mac Mini works fine. For anyone not completely unemployable, that should meet the definition of "affordable". Bump your budget up to $1k, and a little smart shopping, and you can have a fairly nice Mac desktop or Laptop.

And....

[epp_b]

Nothing of value was lost.

Re:Linux is dead on the desktop.

[Bing Tsher E]

No, I don't want to fix it for you when it breaks.

Yah, that's okay. No heroic IT action needed here.

Can you get around to changing the toner in the LJ5 in Finance anytime soon?

Re:Flash will diminish in importance, good for HTM

[mysidia]

It may be a consolidation thing. The Linux desktop has flopped in the general consumer market.... but Android has been amazingly successful.

Android OS is based on a Linux kernel.

Maybe it's time for an Linux-Based, Android-based desktop OS that can run the Android version of flash on a PC , using an ARMv7 emulator, or an additional coprocessor on the Desktop hardware that supports the ARM instruction set?

Time for Linux distributors to leverage the success of the Android mobile OS to make a successful desktop and cloud platform.

Re:Linux is dead on the desktop.

[tqk]

Can you get around to changing the toner in the LJ5 in Finance anytime soon?

Don't you remember? You outsourced all those support positions to India. Just call the HellDesk and sign the cheque (for the airfare to fly them in) when it crosses your desk.

"We are helping!" -- Reboot.

Re:Flash will diminish in importance, good for HTM

[Anonymous Coward]

Adobe doesn't need Desktop Linux.

And the Desktop Linux bunch don't think they need flash:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=638477

If I were Adobe I'd only care about the Windows, Apple and Android platforms. That's it. Just based on the responses from the developers in that bug report (with the exception of Torvalds), you know that they're not interested in end user experience. And so they will remain irrelevant.

Dear Adobe (Charles, John, and Shantanu) ...

[Skapare]

... I wasn't using that piece of crap called Flash, anyway. I'm glad it is finally going away and I will have an even better excuse to tell webmasters to start using Web Standards.

Why hasn't anyone blamed Chrome?

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be easy for Google to say 'no' to this. If you're on Linux, you are soon locked into a single browser to view 1/4 of the web. Welcome to the proprietary world, supported by Google.

Re:Why hasn't anyone blamed Chrome?

[Anonymous Coward]

lol and yet all the linux guys think google is cool but apple is bad, apple refusing to put that crap on their phones is the death blow to flash.

Re:Flash will diminish in importance, good for HTM

[Anonymous Coward]

If that's true, then why did Adobe create Flash for Linux in the first place?

Sometimes people make thing for Linux without need for large profit. It's good PR and helps the community; However, for most people, when you do something for free and find the recipients to be largely rude and ungrateful, you stop doing it.

Don't forget filthy and unhygienic!

congrats Adobe

[Anonymous Coward]

You terminated yourself.

I never thought Apple would. I was right.

I never thought YOU would. Fucking morons.

Re:Flash will diminish in importance, good for HTM

[Skapare]

Ah ha! Proof! ... that my statcounter blocker actually WORKS! BTW, it only works on Linux though I think someone is trying to port it to BSD.

Regression as a parting shot?

[gottabeme]

And as a parting shot at Linux users, Adobe introduces a major regression (hardware accelerated video tints everything blue, e.g. YouTube), claims it can't be reproduced, and closes all bug reports about it, leaving users to implement a nasty hack individually.

How's about an open source alternative?

[Paracelcus]

Reverse engineer a work-alike with original code, call it Splash!

Whattya say?

Re:Linux is dead on the desktop.

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for a small company that makes database visualization software.

[...] you don't matter. You [...] do not constitute a significant market.

What's the name of this small company that thinks 75 individuals is statistically significant, and why should anyone care about you or your irrelevant opinions?

Re:Flash will diminish in importance, good for HTM

[AmazingRuss]

When you give somebody a broken, buggy mess after promising them the moon, they tend to get rude and ungrateful.

Re:Flash will diminish in importance, good for HTM

[pscottdv]

They didn't. MACROMEDIA did. And then Adobe swallowed Macromedia and turned flash into bloatware.

Re:Why I don't read Slashdot any more

[andersenep]

Most people "outside the bubble" as you put it are probably uninformed and have no idea what flash actually is or that alternatives exist. It is up to proficient, informed and educated people to drive new and better technology forward. If all you care about is watching mindless shit on Hulu, than there are literally hundreds of viable solutions to do so. For christ's sake, the article was in reference to a new (albeit the last) version of flash for linux.

Please leave your landline number, and I'll be happy to call you when HTML5 is the no shit standard. Since not everyone has moved on to cell phones, skype, instant messaging, facebook, twitter and email yet, I assume this will be the only way to reach you. Or maybe I could just send you a messenger with a clay tablet or papyrus scroll.

"I'm not bad, I'm just drawn that way"

[paulatz]

"I'm not bad, I'm just drawn that way" that's the problem with flash, visit www.transformice.com to find out the hard way

Re:Linux is dead on the desktop.

[hendrikboom]

You surveyed your customers. If they're customers of yours now, and your software doesn't run on Linux, they must be using OS's other than Linux. Small wonder that they aren't looking for a Linux version. Your sample is biased.

Correction

[linuxgeek64]

Adobe Releases Last NPAPI Linux Version of Flash Player.

It'll be usable on non-Chrome browsers once they get their heads out of the sand and implement Pepper.
Keep up or get left behind. :)

I just have one thing to say:

[diego.viola]

Good riddance.

VP8 on iOS?

[tepples]

[With HTML5 clients,] Adobe doesn't even have to pay the license fees for distributing the H.264 implementation

How so? I was under the impression that the whole reason for a "video server" was to support frame-accurate seeking and live streaming, both of which require encoding capability. I was also under the impression that HTML5 for Safari on iOS wouldn't take VP8.

Re:VP8 on iOS?

[TheRaven64]

They don't have to pay the H.264 client license if they're not the ones shipping the client. They still need to pay the server license, but that's a different issue. As to the frame-accurate seeking, this is possible in HTM5, it's just not easy. You need something on the server to (re)start the stream at the specified location, while current default player implementations just use byte range seeking. There's no reason why Adobe couldn't write an HTML5 player that sent AJAX commands to their server to do the seeking. Same result, less cost to Adobe...

Re:VP8 on iOS?

[tepples]

You need something on the server to (re)start the stream at the specified location, while current default player implementations just use byte range seeking.

If you're using large intervals between keyframes for better compression, and you don't want the client to have to spend a bunch of CPU time decoding ten seconds of preroll starting at the previous keyframe, you need something on the server, which has far more CPU than a netbook, tablet, or smartphone, to reencode all frames between that point and the next keyframe.

Re:VP8 on iOS?

[TheRaven64]

Yes, I'm pretty sure that's what I said...

Re:VP8 on iOS?

[tlhIngan]

If you're using large intervals between keyframes for better compression, and you don't want the client to have to spend a bunch of CPU time decoding ten seconds of preroll starting at the previous keyframe, you need something on the server, which has far more CPU than a netbook, tablet, or smartphone, to reencode all frames between that point and the next keyframe.

The CPU is mostly idle playing back video - the GPU handles all the h.264 decodes and doing that consumes very little power.

And HTTP live streaming is basically a PLS file specifying a bunch of files to play back - a very trivial format that many players can actually handle (I think the Apple default handles around 30 seconds or so per file, letting you skip back quite easily.). It could be done with a basic webserver that only served up static pages (with someone else continually modifying the PLS file).

And the PLS file is the common every day playlist file format that every player for the last decade can handle.

Missing API

[tepples]

Everything you mentioned *could* have been made in a Java applet

Since when can an applet running in the Java virtual machine (ask the user for permission to) turn on the computer's microphone and camera?

Re:Missing API

[EdIII]

He did not mention anything that required a microphone or camera.

I am not an expert in Java applets by any means but a quick search turned up several articles about the Java Media Framework and how to do exactly what you are asking. Granted, that may have been a recent development in the last few years and not available as long as Flash.

As far back as 2005 though I do remember running Java applets from banks that could access a TWAIN scanner locally, so it is not unreasonable to conclude it could not be made to access other hardware as well.

IE/XP, barcode scanning, and 2D vector animation

[tepples]

I suggest HTML5

In HTML5, how do I target Internet Explorer for Windows XP, which still has two years of extended support left? It may surprise geeks, but I'm under the impression that some administrators are still a lot more willing to authorize the installation of Adobe Flash Player than of Google Chrome Frame.

In existing HTML5 implementations, how do I make a barcode scanner application or a voice-controlled application? There's still no way to (ask the user's permission to) read the camera and microphone connected to the user's PC. I've read rumors of a "device API" but I haven't seen any proof of concept.

In HTML5, how do I make 2D vector animation? Say I wanted to make an animated series that was the next Homestar Runner, and I don't want the download size to be XBOX HUEG because the devices least likely to have Flash Player are the most likely to have a single-digit monthly download cap. How should I make and deliver it? I've done tests, and an SWF can bloat by a factor of ten when exported as a video.

Patents will stop only Free implementations

[tepples]

Patents will stop only Free implementations. MPEG-LA has shown itself willing to offer a license to any non-free implementer under fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory terms. Otherwise, AVC wouldn't have taken off to nearly the extent that it did.

Re:Patents will stop only Free implementations

[symbolset]

Obviously MPEG-LA is not the only entity with patents.

Existing SWF

[tepples]

But will the "HTML5 authoring tools" allow converting existing SWF animations, which have gone unmaintained by their authors (hence no .FLA), to work in an HTML5 environment?

Re:Existing SWF

[icebraining]

Probably not, but Google's working on it: http://www.google.com/doubleclick/studio/swiffy/

No commercial use

[tepples]

More people should switch to Vimeo

Except the last time I checked, Vimeo had an explicit prohibition on "commercial use" and on videos related to video games.

Re:Linux is dead on the desktop.

[tepples]

I can think of a few reasons why someone might have no interest in reaching customers in other countries. Perhaps the translation to reach those customers in their native language is cost prohibitive, or perhaps the cost to set up local offices for on-site support is cost prohibitive. Or perhaps certain essential inventions or works have been licensed for use only in one country.

Re:Flash will diminish in importance, good for HTM

[Anonymous Coward]

According to Wikimedia Traffic Analysis - Operating Systems:

February 2010 2011 2012
Linux 1.65% 2.47% 4.90%
Mac 7.08% 7.63% 8.48%
iPhone 1.37% 2.91% 5.34%
Windows 86.95% 81.96% 73.80%

Windows (all versions) has declined 13% over two years. The main reason is that users are accessing Internet through smart devices. Smartphones, pads and Internet devices in peoples homes are growing explosively, as the chart from Asymco indicates. It also implies that Windows will be reduced to ~50% market share in 3-4 years:
http://www.asymco.com/2012/01/17/the-rise-and-fall-of-personal-computing/

Nothing seems to stop this groundbreaking change where people prefer smart devices over PC's. Microsoft Windows are not able to keep up. Unfortunately for Adobe, they invested to little in smart Internet devices based on other OS'es than Windows 3-4 years ago. They treated Apple like a step child. They handled Linux badly. Similar to music CD's being disrupted and replaced by music sales online for the past 7-8 years, Flash is being disrupted by smart devices and HTML5 as we speak. It's not a question on if, but when Flash is used only by a small group of people -- as happened with locomotives with steam engines and CRT TV's.

Cease and desist

[tepples]

I think our best alternative is to just do something else. Make our own TV shows

Some people tried that and got a cease-and-desist from the incumbent networks.

Re:Cease and desist

[gottabeme]

Haha, well, I don't mean using existing franchises--I mean "original" ones. I guess there are plenty of low-budget web-only shows already.

Re:Cease and desist

[tepples]

I don't mean using existing franchises--I mean "original" ones.

People have still got cease and desist from an incumbent publisher that thought the "original" franchise was not original enough, that is, a claim of accidental infringement and/or defamation.

Re:Cease and desist

[theshowmecanuck]

He said 'make our own tv shows' not 'copy fanboy's shows'. And people are doing their own original shows on the internet. And not getting cease and desist orders.

Re:Flash will diminish in importance, good for HTM

[luther349]

the linux desktop did not flop it had a good run with netbooks when the fad started and microsoft said they would not support them. they sold like crazy because they where cheap and then microsoft saw money and forced windows back on them. when windows 8 arm comes out don't be surprised if they don't strong-arm there way into tablets and a cuple years from now someone would call android tablets a failed product.

Barcode scanner, for example

[tepples]

He did not mention anything that required a microphone or camera.

A barcode scanner application does, as does a voice-controlled application.

I do remember running Java applets from banks

I'll take a guess that any applet from a bank has been digitally signed with a commercial code signing certificate and is therefore allowed to use JNI as opposed to 100% Pure Java. Like ActiveX, JNI allows running native code, but like ActiveX, it requires a commercial code signing certificate that has not expired. This arrangement is fine for banks but not necessarily for student or hobbyist developers. I'm under the impression that a lot of hobbyists don't have enough income from their work to obtain and renew a separate commercial code signing certificate for each of several platforms.

Re:Why I don't read Slashdot any more

[luther349]

it just going to mean no more flash on anything but chrome. yea linux has kinda stalled in recent years but if you have been around around the same amount of time i have you know linux has been threw this before. the problem is everyone has there own idea and the segmenting gets out of hand. Ubuntu started bringing everyone one to one standard and was quickly gaining steam really the case with microsofts stumble with vista. but then they decide to lose there minds then desktop linux fell right back into not going anywhere,

Re:Linux is dead on the desktop.

[SteveFoerster]

You're right, but that doesn't change the fact that OP's characterization of the market for desktop Linux as "4 basement dwelling slashdot nerds" is ignorant with a cherry on top.

Re:Flash will diminish in importance, good for HTM

[Anonymous Coward]

Just to clarify the point you are making: Wikipedia lumps Android traffic under "Linux".

http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportOperatingSystems.htm

iPhone 7,909 M 5.34%
Linux Android 4,979 M 3.36%
Linux Other 1,131 M 0.76%
Linux Ubuntu 970 M 0.66%
(rest negligible)

Conclusion: desktop linux is way smaller than mobile.

i guess they finally figured out...

[crutchy]

...that linux users neither want nor need their proprietary flash player.

flash has been the web's unwanted runt bastard since its inception. anyone who uses flash over html5 nowadays should be shot, and then fired, and then shot again just to be sure.

Re:i guess they finally figured out...

[RockDoctor]

Didn't you leave out at least one three-month period of burial in soft peat?

Re:Flash will diminish in importance, good for HTM

[Anonymous Coward]

According to statcounter:
February 2012:
"iOS",1.89
"Linux",0.83

February 2011:
"Linux",0.76
"iOS",0.46

If iOS gets to have an effect, I don't see why desktop linux can't. In this case however, it seems like it would mostly hurt Firefox on Linux. But then again this is in 5 years. 5 years ago, there were a lot more sites with Quicktime, Realplayer, and Windows Media streaming. I barely see them at all today.

Because iOS and Android devices will be a larger part of the market in the future, and desktop linux will not.

Like what?

[dutchwhizzman]

Which good non-proprietary codecs with a wide acceptance are out there? Don't say HTML5, because that's only a container, not a codec. The codecs currently supported in HTML5 are all proprietary as far as I know.

Adobe Business Model?

[dutchwhizzman]

It's not just about content creators. I wonder where Adobe will think the money will come from once they kill flash. PDF is a dead format with all the proprietary e-books and alternative software for them. PostScript is more or less the same with every printer supporting PCL these days better than PostScript. The content editing suites is the only thing left I can think of. I really have my doubts there will be more money to be made with totally focusing on that?

Re:IE/XP, barcode scanning, and 2D vector animatio

[westyvw]

Well W3c defines speech input here: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-xg-htmlspeech/2011Feb/att-0020/api-draft.html and Webkit provides support. Voice controlled video players are already out there using HTML5. I have seen a facial recognition demo in HTML5 that uses a local computer webcam. I would much rather support Chrome or Firefox as a browser then Flash as a plugin. I wouldnt bother targeting IE anything, all the browsers microsoft makes are shit. Getting the boneheads who would use Microsoft at an enterprise level convinced of this is going to be hard, I agree. But if they are on XP and IE they dont give a rats ass about security anyway.

Ehm, I think I see the problem

[SmallFurryCreature]

The site you linked to is a joke. It has zero functionality and is nothing more then a graphics designer wank. Sure, some people can make their living with it and a good living too. Perhaps I should have been clearer, when I talk about web development, I am talking applications. Things closer to google maps then a flash movie.

I simply won't ever get an assignment asking me for full screen animation, that is not what I do. And you are a flash developer. Doesn't it make sense that you would never be asked to make a website that works on the iPad since that is not within your skill set?

We work in the same industry but in completely different sections of it. I would use the link you provided NOT as a point for or against HTML5 vs flash but as a showcase of a REALLY bad design that violates every usability guideline out there.

For me, the removal of flash means the removal of flash forms and flash menu's. If you think those can't be done with HTML5 just as well, you need to talk to better developers. I am not giving advice on how to make games or such stuff as you linked because that is not my business.

Re:Ehm, I think I see the problem

[archont]

Flash is very good for stuff like google maps actually. Look here: http://www.zumi.pl/namapie.html?qt=&loc=warszawa. It didn't have as much development time obviously, being an application targetted for just one country - but that's also part of the point. JS hasn't gotten it's rails yet, object-oriented programming is a mess, there's no type checking. MVC with JS is a pain, with AS3 it just works. What I'm saying is AS3 is a more mature language more suited for bigger applications.

As for iPads I had a request to redo an application ONCE, for an offshore client. Thanks to proper coding I just had to write new concrete I/O classes and some performance tweaks (which got merged into the main branch anyhow) - end result being the iOS APP had 90% common code with the desktop swf version. The inconvenience being the user has to download the app off the market. And when I added another compile target it turned out it works on android too.

And frankly I LIKE this separation. Having to write a version specifically for mobile devices forces you to test the application a lot more thoroughly - beyond just throwing the swf into the wild and assuming it works with the different controls, lower CPU power and resolution.

Flash forms and menus aren't a sane use for flash and you know it. If you're website isn't flash-based you don't want to have critical parts of it like data entry or navigation in flash. Then again the same goes with JS - unless JS is required for the core functionality, eg. maps, you want your fancy animated menu to gracefully work in noscript-ed browsers.

Re:Flash will diminish in importance, good for HTM

[Anonymous Coward]

Giving Wikimedia statistics, Linux muddles around 1,5% in 2010-2012. Linux minus Android: Feb 2010 -- 1,54%, Feb 2011 -- 1,48%, Feb 2012 -- 1,54%.

Re:Flash will diminish in importance, good for HTM

[wvmarle]

Apple has mind share, Linux not. That's a big difference. It's also why every new minor update release of the iPhone or iPad is frontpage news in papers all over the world, and Linux is basically never even mentioned.

Re:Why I don't read Slashdot any more

[Dr.Ruud]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Little_Pigs

Windows and Flash are of straw.

New competitors to flash coming soon

[lsatenstein]

Actually, Since Adobe is dropping flash support for Linux, the FOSS community will probably find quite a few developers that will introduce newer and better players. When one door closes, another opens.

Besides, would flash not continue to work with ndiswrapper? If not so, what is the concern?

I for one would like to see a fully free unencumbered flash replacement where, being universal, anyone from any operating system could make their own interactive displays.
The question to ask, is Adobe under pressure from the big 3 to stop Linux support?
.

Boycott Adobe

[Cherubim1]

Adobe never had any interest in supporting GNU/Linux for the long run since they are mostly a Windows shop. With the rapid proliferation of HTML5/WebM there really is no need to worry about Adobe's woefully insecure and buggy flash technology. Flash is one of the biggest causes of heavy web browser resource usage and instability and I for one can't wait to see the end of this dreadful piece of software. It's been a boil on the surface of the web. As for Adobe's other products - they are all bloated, overpriced and user-hostile. Many alternatives exist which cost considerably less. One can do fine without Adobe.

figures

[xcix]

Adobe was never really Linux-friendly to begin with, and now they can stop pretending to be.

i don't see a problem

[Anonymous Coward]

i have transferred my hatred of adobe to google chrome

Preroll; gapless

[tepples]

The CPU is mostly idle playing back video - the GPU handles all the h.264 decodes and doing that consumes very little power.

Nor do you want the client to have to spend a bunch of GPU time decoding ten seconds of preroll if it is seeking to a point that's one second before a keyframe.

Interesting thought about live streaming being a PLS file, but is this sort of PLS playback guaranteed to be gapless?

So Linux is dead

[CharlyFoxtrot]

I look forward to all the articles that will be posted on Slashdot on how desktop Linux is now officially dead and will be completely replaced by other operating systems that do support Flash. Worked for Android, right ?

It's a good start...

[drunkennewfiemidget]

Now how can we convince Adobe to stop making software entirely?

Adobe sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate Adobe. While I do give them credit for developing Flash and Adobe Reader all of these years, finally ditching Linux is a shame. Dealing with their products on Windows is a constant battle in an enterprise environment not only updating their software every other week due to new security holes, but licensing is a joke and their installers are a nightmare to get the update popups to go away, etc. To top it off, their software is expensive and extremely bloated.