Slashdot Mirror
Adobe Resurrects Flash Player On Linux (neowin.net)
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.
Probably Adobe's marketing. They realized that while the Linux userbase is small comparatively, it's a bad idea to have any significant number of users to go long periods with no interactions with any of their products. (If you have a class of users that never touch your products, they're unlikely to do so in the future. Sort of like the struggles some American automakers have had getting people to even consider their cars after buying Japanese cars for so long.) Since the only brand-facing product they've got for Linux is the long-neglected, dying Flash plugin, they decided to try to revive it. It's a failing strategy, but it placated marketing.
Given their attitude, horrific user 'support', painful and extortionist pricing, repeatedly screwing over of entire platforms, and other customer indignities, I am Beyond caring about them. The world has moved on, no one cares about this dying platform any more.
While I was slightly interested in new updates, the fact that they removed the two features that would be useful to me on the builds I need shattered that faint hope. I should have known better than to expect functionality much less quality from Adobe. All this seems to be is that someone figured out it was less work, and therefore cheaper, to keep up with Linux builds than to update a years old code base that no one remembers how to patch. It isn't largesse, it is CYA on security
I would say I told you so, but when they announced a pullback on platforms ~4-5 years ago I did tell them so. All my friends there laughed and said I didn't have a clue. Within six months they had all quit. Within 2 years, Flash was walking dead, everyone with a stake in the market had solidified the alternatives and it was just a matter of time. Now they are trying to spin cost savings as a step in the right direction. The corpse is rotting but still managing to do PR, let it die the lonely death it deservers. Nothing to see here, move along.
I use this to use PPAPI flash in Firefox in Debian, for what is NPAPI needed?