Slashdot Mirror
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."
I'll return the favor, and dump you now, Adobe.
I expect Flash to be phased out in favor of non-proprietary alternatives in the near future(3-4 Years).
...where I was when I heard the news. So long...
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.
Flash won't be supported in Linux, and isn't supported on IOS. If anything this will be e good boost for HTML5
Adobe kills Flash for Linux. - "This is supposed to be a happy occasion. Let's not bicker and argue about who killed who."
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
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!
For YouTube, just enable the HTML5 experiment. No Flash needed.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
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.
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.
Desktop Linux is not a large enough market to have any significant bearing on the importance of Flash.
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!"
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.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
Can't other browsers just adopt the Pepper API?
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
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
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.
One of the top causes for my netbook's fan to become noisy.
And nothing of value was lost.
'When the Going gets Weird, the Weird turn Pro.' - Hunter S. Thompson
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.
and thanks for all the 100%-CPU-use times?
I don't think Adobe is expecting Flash to last that long. They're already releasing HTML5 authoring tools to prepare ground.
Dilbert RSS feed
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.
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
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:
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.
I agree, but it's not Hulu instituting the restrictions, it's the copyright holders, and apparently Hulu sucks at negotiating.
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?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
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.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
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.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
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.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
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...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
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.
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.
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.