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

[Elbereth]

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

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

[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.

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: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: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: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.

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.

Value

[tessellated]

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

And nothing of value was lost.

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: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?

[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.