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

Okay

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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

[hobarrera]

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

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

[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.

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."

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!

[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!

[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: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.

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: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: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: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: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: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: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:Fcuk you Adobe

[rainmouse]

We don't need a stinky user base!

Fixed it for you.

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:Hulu Desktop?

[mcavic]

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

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: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?

[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.