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

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?

[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.

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

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

[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: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.

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: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

[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

[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.