Adobe Makes Flash on GNU/Linux Chrome-Only 404
ekimd writes "Adobe has anounced their plans to abandon future updates of their Flash player for Linux. Partnering with Google, after the release of 11.2, 'the Flash Player browser plugin for Linux will only be available via the 'Pepper' API as part of the Google Chrome browser distribution and will no longer be available as a direct download from Adobe.' Viva la HTML 5!"
And it appears that Mozilla won't be implementing Pepper anytime soon.
Ahem (Score:1, Insightful)
And nothing of value was lost. Here's to people moving to the free alternatives.
Re:Ahem (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed.
I (like most) hate flash. It’s a pain to get running, even more of a pain to get audio working correctly if you use something like jackd, sucks a tonne of resources, crashes all the time, etc.
That said, there have always been _just enough_ headaches around not having flash to make it worth the bother.
I doubt this will kill flash or even make any impact towards that goal. Linux firefox users just isn’t a big enough market. It will however be the shove I needed to look into getting away from requiring flash (alternate video player plugins to watch flash video (99% of my need for flash) and maybe greasemonkey scripts or something to deal with flash navigation on the few sites I can’t simply ignore.
I mean I can always install chrome as just a “flash browser” .. but that sounds really icky.
Deathbed (Score:5, Insightful)
Flash is on its deathbed anyway. Even Adobe realized that and is migrating everything to HTML5, even employing programmers to implement HTML5/CSS3 features in WebKit.
Adobe gives a 5 year migration period which is probably more that HTML5 needs to succeed widespread.
Legacy works (Score:5, Insightful)
Flash is on its deathbed anyway.
All the existing Flash animations and games on Weebl's Stuff, Homestar Runner, Kongregate, and Newgrounds are likely to keep SWF on life support for a very long time, be it through Adobe Flash Player or through Gnash.
Re:Meh... (Score:4, Insightful)
I said this in an earlier comment, but I've always found there is _just enough_ flash still out there for it to be a headache not to have it.
Flash video is no problem (alternate players, worst case you can just download it and play it out of browser) .. site navigation can be dealt with sometimes.. but there are still a select few sites that you need for whatever reason (banking, work) that are largely flash based. And unfortunately linux firefox users are not a big enough market to push these sites away from flash.
Re:Meh... (Score:2, Insightful)
Don't forget un-deletable supercookies!
Re:And nothing of value of lost ... (Score:5, Insightful)
"In fact, I'm not sure I can name a single site I use that makes use of Flash."
So you never use youtube then? Or any of the TV catch up services? You never view any lectures on TED?
Re:Terminology (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Goodbye, Adobe (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmm, there's this little app called Photoshop that might keep them afloat for a while.
Re:Meh... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Mozilla? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Google Microsoft (Score:3, Insightful)
The end of an era (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been doing rich client development in Flash ever since 2000 and to me the Flash Player for x86/Linux was a big selling point. True x-platform RTE with a huge amount of awesome features and a very good programming language with AS2 and AS3. A free cli compiler for all major platforms including Linux and an awesome workflow for building custom UIs with the Flash IDE.
I don't think there will be such a widespread and powerfull platform again in the future - it's a shame Adobe missed out on the whole touch revolution in the Flash dept. Just last year I bought my last stack of OReillys for Flex and AS development for a project I had. ... Guess that will have been my last. Just this morning I though of stashing them away to make room for my new C++ stack.
For me, one thing is for sure: As awesome as Flash was, it is the one and only proprietary platform and technology I will ever have invested significant time in. From here on out it's only truely OSI compliant FOSS technologies and PLs for me. That was also the main reason I didn't move into Unity3D when I was doing game development a while back.
Flash/AS it was a great 11 years. You will be missed.
My 2 cents.
Re:And nothing of value of lost ... (Score:3, Insightful)
I look forward to the demise of Flash.
Initially this will hurt Firefox on Linux. It might be an indication that Adobe doesn't intend to put a lot of resources into Flash anymore, but the action itself should have very little impact on Flash.
Re:Legacy works (Score:0, Insightful)
Right...so if the authors of the garbage don't care about it any more, why should anyone else exactly?
Re:Why no PPAPI? (Score:4, Insightful)
If it is, I'd like to see that pointed out on their Wiki pages. Right now, it simply mentions that they're not going to implement Pepper with no further explanation. When I go to the Pepper web site, I see all kinds of reasons why one would want to implement Pepper. If the Mozilla people just wrote a few words explaining the situation, it would make the situation much easier for confused users like me.
Re:Goodbye, Adobe (Score:5, Insightful)
DRM Video (Score:5, Insightful)
In addition to the tons of legacy content that will never be converted (due to limitations in tools, or abandonment), there is a lot of new content for which HTML 5 in not appropriate.
For example, there are a lot of nice video streaming services out there, and they all have been forced to use some sort of DRM by content providers. While I refuse to accept DRM on products I buy, I don't have an issue with it for rental/subscription services as long as it is available on the platforms I use, which can be an issue even without DRM. With Silverlight DRM not being included in Moonlight, you already could not watch Netflix and some live sports, now with Flash being discontinued for Linux, there will be no way to watch Hulu Plus, Amazon Instant Video, or any of the streaming video provided by networks. This is a use of Flash that HTML5 will never replace, because of valid ideological differences in the purpose of open web standards.
I don't consider a tool that is used for 90% of commercial video streaming, with no migration path to other tools to be "on its deathbed".
Re:And nothing of value of lost ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, no apparently. And, if I do, I have native apps on my iPad for them ... none of them are running Flash.
Awesome, so the solution to replacing a small proprietary plugin like Flash is to buy an entirely proprietary OS and/or device.
Re:Ahem (Score:4, Insightful)
Newer versions of firefox can even watch Youtube videos without flash...
So, overall, I don't think I'm missing anything without flash on my computer, except a lot of stuff I'd rather miss anyway.
Re:And nothing of value of lost ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:DRM Video (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't consider a tool that is used for 90% of commercial video streaming, with no migration path to other tools to be "on its deathbed".
http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/html-media/raw-file/tip/encrypted-media/encrypted-media.html [w3.org]
Re:Deathbed (Score:5, Insightful)
What I is the demise of flash being used for the wrong things, which is just as good. Flash will no longer be a requirement for video or richer interaction / graphics / animations as HTML5 takes hold, which is a good thing. People are quick to forget in all the HTML5 excitement though there are still plenty of legitimate applications that HTML5 can't do, or at least, won't do very well.
As an example, how about a SIP video softphone accessible from a browser? In Flash you would implement this through an applet that connects to a server application using RTMP (with RTMP over UDP for media) and you have access to a variety of codecs, where the server application performs the actual bridging to SIP destinations and any media transcoding. Is it possible with HTML5? Perhaps, if WebSockets was a mature enough technology and the streaming video / audio codecs were sophisticated enough, but they certainly aren't in the current state of the standard, though I would love to be proven wrong.
Re:Terminology (Score:2, Insightful)
No... it's more like really only the rabid RMS fanbois call it that.
The rest of us call it "Linux". It's no more really called "Gnu/Linux", than the system I used at University was really called "Gnu/AIX" simply because of all the Gnu software that was installed... or Cygwin is called "Gnu/Cygwin", because of all the Gnu software that comes installed with it.
Re:Terminology (Score:4, Insightful)
Given we are talking about Flash (graphical application) and Linux (OS kernel), the posterior probability that one running GNU userland would use X11 (like xorg) is almost one. Licenses have nothing to do with that sentence.
Re:Terminology (Score:5, Insightful)
HTML V5 is gonna be locked down tighter than a nun's thighs and is controlled by one of the most aggressive patent trolls there has ever been and THAT is good? Has everyone kinda had a senior moment and forgot that H.264 is patented up the ass and is controlled by a conglomeration that will happily sue your ass if you look at them funny?
Well, most flash video is H.264 too, it's pretty hard to argue that HTML5/H.264 will be worse than Flash/H.264. Right now the alternatives to H.264 are as dead as Ogg Theora was to music but since everybody's blocking each other I assume the status quo will be maintained until the H.264 patents expire in the 2020s. You're pretending like this achieves something but I don't see how, except to continue promoting flash over HTML. You may notice that all the other players that now play YouTube videos dropped flash, but continue to use H.264. There's absolutely zero traction for moving away.
Re:Err , not really (Score:5, Insightful)
And to make sure they don't come back:
rm -rf ~/.macromedia; ln -s /dev/null ~/.macromedia
Re:Terminology (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Terminology (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ahem (Score:2, Insightful)
Did you stop to think that maybe its audio on Linux that is the train wreck and Flash is just one of the many victims. Until Linux has ONE audio API that is well done, simple and elegant, that just works, and that all apps can reliably use, without having to implement 10 different audio API's, its pretty much doomed as a desktop OS. Audio is just one of the worst instances where fragmentation makes Linux unusable as a desktop OS, GNOME .vs. KDE .vs. a million other window managers is another.
P.S. ALSA isn't it that one API because ALSA is a head on wreck between two trains at full speed, Neither is OSS, pulseaudio, jack, esd, OpenAL, aRts, OK, I'll stop now.
Re:Terminology (Score:2, Insightful)
Exactly.
I really appreciate what the FSF has done in the past (gcc, glibc, etc.) but it's getting old. They are like some old guy who did something great 20 years ago and now insists that everybody should constantly thank him for it - in perpetuity.
What has the FSF done in the last 10 years? All the important projects from the last years (KDE, Open/Libreoffice, Mozilla, Linux) have nothing to do with GNU.
The label "GNU/Linux" was OK in the mid-90s, but not anymore.
Re:And nothing of value of lost ... (Score:4, Insightful)
"As I said, the solution is to simply not use Flash"
Sorry, the solution to what? Thats not a solution , its a problem that has to be solved if you want to look at a number of websites. You might drink the apple koolaid and believe Flash is the work of the devil but we're not all Jobs sheep.
Re:Ahem (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, Chromium [Browser] is Chrome [Browser] without Google's "spyware" (loaded term, but you get the idea).