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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.

21 of 153 comments (clear)

  1. Brains! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Must feed...

  2. Who wants this? by ErikTheRed · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Adobe Flash is pretty much just an ongoing security vulnerability that lets people watch videos on obsolete web sites, occasionally used by companies that have such complete and utter contempt for the security of their customers that they use it as a shoddy shortcut in web development (looking at you, VMWare, ADP, and others).

    --

    Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
    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 Hognoxious · · Score: 4, Insightful

      knowing != caring.

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    3. Re:Who wants this? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    4. 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.

    5. Re:Who wants this? by somenickname · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Almost no one wants or cares about this. I've been Flash-free for several years now and it's very rare to run into any kind of issue. If you do run into a website that needs flash, treat it the same way you'd treat a website that requires you to turn off your ad blocker: Go somewhere else.

    6. 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
    7. Re:Who wants this? by tepples · · Score: 2

      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.

      Was this hissy fit prior to the availability of the Widevine CDM for HTML5 EME? (Google owns Widevine.)

    8. Re:Who wants this? by tepples · · Score: 2

      What's the alternative to Dagobah, Albino Blacksheep, Newgrounds, and Weebl's Stuff? To which "somewhere else" do you refer?

    9. Re:Who wants this? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Your "but how will I watch my favorite turn-of-the-century Flash cartoons?" spiel is getting old. I don't see you complaining that you can't run NES software natively on current platforms, you emulate/virtualize or you keep the old hardware in service, that's how things are. Same for Flash cartoons, if you like them you'll always find a way to keep enjoying them, but the vast majority of the world out there doesn't care at all no matter how much you whine about it.

  3. it is not resurrected. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    it is undead.

  4. For fuck's sake by Chewbacon · · Score: 2, Funny

    Why won't you JUST DIE?

    --
    Chewbacon
    The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
  5. Adobe who? by Groo+Wanderer · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  6. Re:Too little, too late by Carewolf · · Score: 2

    Flash is dying and i cannot wait to witness its rotten, fly-ridden corpse.

    I would rather not see that, the miasma puts me in a bad mood. Would be better if it just vanished as if it had never existed. Then again EME and its CDM plugins that has replaced Flash for encrypted media are not much of an improvement.

  7. DRM Encumbered Flash disabled by Zombie+Ryushu · · Score: 2

    Note they mention that it won't support DRM Flash. In order to use DRM Flash on Linux you still have to get the PPAPI Plugin that comes with ChromeBooks.

  8. PPAPI already works fine in Linux Firefox by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I use this to use PPAPI flash in Firefox in Debian, for what is NPAPI needed?

  9. Re:Bye Bye Adobe by AvitarX · · Score: 2

    It worked for where I work.

    It was going to take 2 years for the subscription to cost more than purchasing upgrades, and kept us current.

    $600/year vs $800/every 18 months to stay current, enough where I worked we didn't stay current and paid closer to $1200 every three years. It was constant frustration trying to get the budget for the upgrades.

    The creative cloud made things current, and was able to be sold as not costing more for quite while.

    I think the real reason they switched is that small businesses purchases rather than pirated when it was cheaper than internet instead of thousands of dollars up front though ($1800 if memory serves).

    --
    Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
  10. Re:Too little, too late by hairyfeet · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Mark my words in 5 years you will be crying for Flash to come back, because it will be replaced by a DRM infested mess that will only run on "security approved" OSes, aka the absolute latest products from the big 3...Linux? It won't be playing shit, neither will Windows 7/8/8.1, it'll be Win 10, Google ChromeOS/Android (insert newest number) and the newest iOS/OSX.

    I'd be 100% in agreement with you IF it'd be replaced by something better...it won't, it'll be a corporate love letter to the big 3 OSes and big media and will be worse than Flash in EVERY way, DRM, memory, CPU, bandwidth, because that isn't the point, the point is to give the corps what they wanted out of Flash...lock in and DRM...enjoy.

    --
    ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
  11. Re:How to enforce return without DRM? by linuxrocks123 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    You don't even need to do that. Just get a Hauppauge HD-PVR and record from component out. I do this all the time to record cable TV with MythTV, and it gives an excellent quality result, with no DRM circumvention or camcorder required. I have zero interest in piracy: the recordings are for my own personal use only. But if I'm paying for cable with HBO, I'm at least going to have an uncrippled DVR.

    If the FCC ever lets the cable companies turn off component out, then it's time for MythTV users to break out the HDMI-to-component converters. These are like $30 on Amazon and reportedly work just fine with HDCP.

    And if they ever stamp those out somehow (they're made by random companies in China, so good luck to them), then, well ... HDCP is totally broken and the master key has been leaked. I'm sure some Verilog or VHDL sources for various FPGAs that include HDMI ports would soon pop up.

    My view is they should give up on the DRM and just do watermarking. I don't give a shit if my recordings are watermarked, because I'm not going to upload them. Almost no homebrew DVR users want to upload pirated TV. So, if they do DRM, their opponents are "every geek with a homebrew DVR or other legitimate need for uncrippled media access, plus the few people who want to upload pirated TV". If they do watermarking, their opponents are "only the few people who want to upload pirated TV".

    Seriously. Just invisibly watermark the damn movies and TV shows, then take legal action against the uploaders. It's a perfect win-win solution. Dumbass control freaks are dumbass control freaks, though.

    --
    vi ~/.emacs # I'm probably going to Hell for this.
  12. EME flash by jopsen · · Score: 2

    From what understand Mozilla is working hard to make sure EME will work with firefox under linux... It'll still require binary blobs, but these can be downloaded automatically and will run completely sandboxed.

    Mozilla took a lot of fire for the decision to support EME, but in reality the alternative is that DRM'ed content will only be available on Windows/OS X/IOS/Android/ChromeOS using IE/saferi/chrome.
    Yes, EME is still a sad practical choice, but at least the linux desktop will continue to be a viable option. That's how I see it.