Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Adobe Resurrects Flash Player On Linux (neowin.net)

Posted by BeauHD on from the back-from-the-dead dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Neowin: Four years ago, Adobe made a decision to stop updating the Flash Player package (NPAPI) on Linux, aside from delivering security patches. It has made an about turn on this decision in the last week and has said that it will keep it in sync with the modern release branch going forward. In its announcement, Adobe wrote: "In the past, we communicated that NPAPI Linux releases would stop in 2017. This is no longer the case and once we have performed sufficient testing and received community feedback, we will release both NPAPI and PPAPi Linux builds with their major version numbers in sync and on a regular basis." Although this is great news for Linux users who don't want to struggle to watch Flash content online, there also a few drawbacks. Adobe writes: "Because this change is primarily a security initiative, some features (like GPU 3D acceleration and premium video DRM) will not be fully implemented. If you require this functionality we recommend that you use the PPAPI version of Flash Player." You can download the new NPAPI binaries from the Adobe Labs download page.

3 of 153 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Who wants this? by ZorinLynx · · Score: 5, Informative

    >occasionally used by companies that have such complete and utter contempt for the security of their customers

    Google is among them. Flash is required for Play Music.

    It's one of those things that made my jaw drop when I noticed. You'd think Google would know better!

  2. Re:Who wants this? by geek · · Score: 4, Informative

    >occasionally used by companies that have such complete and utter contempt for the security of their customers

    Google is among them. Flash is required for Play Music.

    It's one of those things that made my jaw drop when I noticed. You'd think Google would know better!

    Google doesn't have a choice. The music labels require the flash DRM to stream music. Google had an HTML5 option in the settings but its been greyed out for about a year because the labels had a hissy fit.

  3. Re:Who wants this? by Trogre · · Score: 2, Informative

    Games. Flash games.

    While the performance of Flash is not on par with native compiled code, it still outperforms AJAX/HTML5 solutions by orders of magnitude.

    Of course, one still needs to change the rendering quality to Medium from the default High, since the over-zealous anti-aliasing always makes the result slower than it should be.

    But yes, there's no need to use it for video any more, and there is DEFINITELY no need for it in site navigation (nor has there ever been).

    --
    "Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife