Adobe Announces Plans To Abandon Flash On Linux

[makomk]

...Okay; so all we have to do is convince the Mozilla developers to support the Pepper API, and they SHOULD be able to get the Flash-plugin-for-Chrome code to work with Firefox -- right? Then someone can write a script that downloads Chrome and extracts Flash and sticks it in the Firefox plugins dir. Done.

Then, any other webkit browsers that also want to support Flash will have to tag along and support Pepper, and then in the long term, everything will continue to work with Flash as before. It's more like "Adobe Abandons NPAPI Support On Linux".

Pepper API may in fact be a superior solution anyway. NPAPI was designed a VERY long time ago (90s) and I don't think it meets the needs of modern browser architectures and plugins. In fact, supporting NPAPI with such advanced browsers as Chrome requires a LOT of ugly hacks because of the design of NPAPI.

Thad'd probably make about as much sense as using Wine to embed the Windows version of Flash, to be honest. PPAPI has a whole bunch of APIs for stuff like file access, rendering, OpenGL, webcam acceleration, etc that Mozilla would need to implement with bug-for-bug compatibility, and at that point you may as well just give up and use Wine and the Windows plugin - sure, the Windows APIs aren't as clean, but there's already a decent standalone implementation of them!

I see Adobe hasn't defined how it's going to distribute the plugin, and that's because nothing but Chrome supports PPAPI.

Except that Chromium also supports it. Right now Chromium users don't have any way of getting hold of the version of the plugin that's bundled with Google Chrome, and it doesn't look like this is changing. Flash really is becoming a Chrome-only feature on Linux.

[Lemmiwinks]

At least, Flash 11.2 seems to become the best working Flash version on Linux so far. I tried the beta 5 and it did vdpau video rendering and also accelerated video decoding for me. The CPU usage was notably lower than with 11.0 or 11.1. It still crashes a lot though.

[Lemmiwinks]

By the way, Flash 11.2 has been officially released a few days ago, and it fuckin' rocks on Nvidia Geforce 8+ hardware! I don't get any crashes anymore, it uses hardware accelerated decoding and rendering (vpdau) and therefore hardly uses any cpu resources. I installed it via the firefox flash aid addon, to enable hardware acceleration, very handy method!

[ChrisXY]

At least, Flash 11.2 seems to become the best working Flash version on Linux so far. I tried the beta 5 and it did vdpau video rendering and also accelerated video decoding for me. The CPU usage was notably lower than with 11.0 or 11.1. It still crashes a lot though.

Try disabling accelerated video decoding and be surprised how the best working flash version so far has swapped red/blue channels.
Also I wouldn't call it good, not even usable, until https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?...bug&id=2908816 is fixed.

[Prescience500]

I wonder if the upcoming switch to Wayland had anything to do with this Adobe decision.

[gedgon]

and it fuckin' rocks on Nvidia Geforce 8+ hardware! I don't get any crashes anymore, it uses hardware accelerated decoding and rendering

Really? Crashing like crazy here.

[Lemmiwinks]

Hmm you are right, it does not like fast seeking.. Which Nvidia driver version are you using?

[asdx]

Thad'd probably make about as much sense as using Wine to embed the Windows version of Flash, to be honest. PPAPI has a whole bunch of APIs for stuff like file access, rendering, OpenGL, webcam acceleration, etc that Mozilla would need to implement with bug-for-bug compatibility, and at that point you may as well just give up and use Wine and the Windows plugin - sure, the Windows APIs aren't as clean, but there's already a decent standalone implementation of them!



Except that Chromium also supports it. Right now Chromium users don't have any way of getting hold of the version of the plugin that's bundled with Google Chrome, and it doesn't look like this is changing. Flash really is becoming a Chrome-only feature on Linux.

Why can't we just move on from proprietary blobs like Flash already and support open standards? This is a great opportunity for doing that.