
Flash For Linux Will Only Be Available For Chrome - hotice
http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplayer/2012/02/adobe-and-google-partnering-for-flash-player-on-linux.html
======
radarsat1
You know, it's strange that Adobe hasn't considered, at this point in time,
open-sourcing the Flash player. Please, hear me out, because I don't just mean
this as an HH (Hopeful Hacker), but also as a well-thought-out IBD
(Intelligent Business Decision):

Flash has obviously been very beneficial to them in the long run. It has given
them the only remaining well-controlled proprietary piece of the web. This
helps them sell their IDE, and more importantly, gets their brand out there.

Now, I'd argue that these goals have now been _accomplished_. Adobe is well-
entrenched in web history, and everyone knows what Flash is. However, the
relevance of Flash is clearly declining, due to HTML5, and stigma and
disgruntlement is increasing. This means they will get less and less sales of
their IDE and their name will fizzle out.

Imagine for a second that they open sourced the Flash player. Just the player.
Suddenly it would no longer carry such a stigma with Linux, it would be easy
to include in distros, developers would contribute fixes and make it more
efficient on hard-to-support systems. It would literally stretch out its life-
time as a product, and _keep_ Adobe's name on the web.

I argue that Flash has played out its role for Adobe, and if they open source
it _now_ it could only benefit them. I did not think this was true in the
past, and I think it will not be true in 5 to 10 years when HTML5 has
surpassed Flash adoption in the most important venues. However, right _now_ I
think it would benefit them immensely.

There also seems to be a sentiment from some of the comments here that they
are losing interest in maintaining Flash, so opening it to the community would
seem to make some sense. If the "standard" ends up evolving in any way, they'd
always have a head-start in their IDE support, since it will easily remain
ahead of the curve.

~~~
windsurfer
There are over 70 patents and licensed libraries in Flash. It would basically
be impossible to get those companies to agree to open source and give away all
their IP. For a while, Adobe was paying over a dollar per Android Flash
install because some of their licenses only applied to desktop.

So one might say they should open source the core of Flash, the JIT compiler
and virtual machine, and not the parts that are licensed. And you're right,
that would be the correct move! They did that in 2006:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamarin_%28software%29>

They also open sourced the Flex SDK:
<http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Flex+SDK>

What Adobe needs is a completely new product that is available to consumers
for free, has it's source code public and free from patents. This way, Adobe
tools can still be sold and used to develop, while the player is ubiquitous
and as widely spread as possible. And that's what they're trying to do with
HTML5: <http://www.adobe.com/solutions/html5.html>

Adobe's communication to developers is bad. No one knows about any this.
Technology isn't their problem, marketing is.

~~~
yuhong
If you visit the <http://crash-stats.mozilla.org> site, you may have noticed
the obfuscated Flash symbols starting with F followed by some random number.

~~~
windsurfer
...okay? What is your point?

~~~
yuhong
Why do you think the symbols had to be obfuscated?

~~~
windsurfer
Why do you think I would be asking what your point is?

------
ootachi
For reference, here are the thoughts of Robert O'Callahan from Mozilla (and
those of Simon Fraser from Apple) on Pepper:
[https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/plugin-
futures/2010-April...](https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/plugin-
futures/2010-April/000088.html)

The thread (which continues into May) goes over pretty clearly why they felt
Pepper was a bad idea.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
Google has a nasty habit of developing some technology in a dark room, then
dropping it on the web community and being confused when no one is that
interested (Dart is the other big example). It makes me wonder if they
_really_ want these projects to be cross-platform successful or not.

~~~
shimon_e
Adobe is dropping linux support after 11.2. With the except of Chrome due to a
new API that "aims to provide a layer between the plugin and browser that
abstracts away differences between browser and operating system
implementations."

Given that linux really hasn't been a priority for them and they are dropping
flash all together; this isn't really news.

The press release says Adobe worked with Google on Pepper. So for them to have
a bias towards it isn't groundbreaking.

~~~
gcp
_With the except of Chrome due to a new API_

This is what's hard to understand: they are not dropping NPAPI on Windows, so
it's not like the Chrome API is the enabler here.

~~~
shimon_e
From the press release it seems NPAPI is OS dependent while Pepper is less so.

This all assume there is actually going to be something more than security
updates after 11.2 for other platforms. And that it is going to be something
we would want on Linux.

~~~
justinschuh
>From the press release it seems NPAPI is OS dependent while Pepper is less
so.

Correct. The NPAPI version of Flash is very platform-dependent; whereas Pepper
Flash is almost completely platform neutral, and Chrome OS needs most of the
same Pepper platform bits anyway. So, our maintenance overhead for Pepper
Flash on Linux is very small. On top of that, Linux is broadly deployed
throughout Google (and is very popular among Chrome developers), so we're
scratching our own itch a bit.

~~~
0x0
Flash provides a lot of hardware abstractions, from H.264 accelerated video,
to webcam and microphone access, and accelerated 3d (openGL) rendering. Does
the Pepper API provide wrappers for all this stuff? Otherwise it would seem
that Flash for Linux would still need to carry a lot of platform-dependent
plumbing.

~~~
justinschuh
Yes, the sandbox disallows direct hardware access. So, the PPAPI provides
abstractions to those underlying capabilities.

------
gcp
I can't make much sense of this. Adobe declared Flash dead. Apple declared
Flash dead. Google declared Flash dead in Chrome for Android.

Now, they're going to continue working on Flash, but only on a new API that is
implemented only in a single browser in Linux (and from statements from Apple
and Mozilla, will stay that way), but keeping it compatible with the old NPAPI
on Windows?

What I don't even....

Edit: Could it be that Google is planning to release (or has released) some
Linux-based appliance where Flash support is a must?

~~~
shimon_e
They are basically saying due to Pepper there is no or little work in getting
flash to work in Chrome on Linux... so there will be continued support.

The real question is if this is true, why are they dropping flash for android?

~~~
hub_
No. Just that Google will do it for them in Chrome. That's what they already
do anyway because of the security hole that Flash is.

~~~
tyleregeto
Where'd you pull that idea out of? Google's not implementing the Flash player,
only providing new API for the Flash engineers to build against, the same as
they always have.

~~~
gcp
From previous statements and actions of Google regarding Flash (fixing
security holes in a way that implies they have source code access), it is very
likely that it is indeed _Google_ that are doing this.

------
k33n
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like other browsers are free to
implement the "pepper" API as well. It seems as though they are not saying
"we're only supporting Chrome". They are saying "Chrome is the only browser
that has implemented Pepper so far, and we're only supporting Pepper on
Linux".

~~~
cmsj
Think licensing.

If the Adobe blog post is correct and the pepper plugin is only distributed
with _Chrome_ and isn't open source and part of _Chromium_ then how is another
browser going to support it? They'd have to tell you to install Chrome and
then open the plugin from within Chrome's installed directory. Pretty ugly
solution. If it's open source and part of Chromium then they can at least take
the source out and ship their own, assuming the licensing allows for that and
is compatible with their license.

All in all, this sounds like a pretty complex scenario for non-Chrome browser.

~~~
ConceptJunkie
I'm betting the distro packagers like Canonical will solve the problem for end
users.

Meanwhile, Flash continues to circle the drain, and this might hasten its
inevitable, but slow demise.

~~~
gcp
_I'm betting the distro packagers like Canonical will solve the problem for
end users._

They might simply shift to Chrome as their default browser.

~~~
justincormack
Not Chrome, they can't it is not open source. They could switch to Chromium,
which could presumably run flash, but it is not clear how you obtain it if
only Chrome will distribute it. Presumably they will have to distribute it as
they say they will ship security updates, but that is unclear, as Linux flash
does not auto update from Adobe.

------
bwarp
I get the feeling this isn't going to be that much of a problem. I've not got
the flash plugin installed in Firefox and I'm not finding any great hardship
these days.

Perhaps it'll kill Flash a bit quicker considering the amount of Kiosks and
Internet cafes running Firefox+Flash on Linux.

~~~
lmm
This might be more of a problem for FreeBSD than it is for Linux; at the
moment, one can use flash on FreeBSD via linux firefox and hackery. I'm not
aware of a way to use linux chrome as yet.

~~~
gsa
Check out FlashVideoReplacer [1]. It replaces videos with your browser media
plugin or can launch it in a separate player. I use it with gecko-mediaplayer
and love it!

[1] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/flashvideorep...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/flashvideoreplacer/)

------
raphinou
Let's hope this is one more step to Flash irrelevance. I don't count the times
that Flash caused me trouble, and I'll be happy to see it go away.

~~~
loevborg
I think Adobe is nuts to be so hostile to its Linux users. Surely it can't be
that expensive to continue developing the old plugin? The thing Flash had
going for it was its ubiquity: it worked on all (desktop) browser. Now that
that's gone, this will be another good reason not to have new projects depend
on Flash.

~~~
ConceptJunkie
Adobe has always been this hostile to Linux users. It hasn't seemed to had
much of a dent in their success.

Meanwhile, Flash is dead, it just hasn't stopped kicking yet. It's been a long
decade, but many people will be cheering it and kicking the corpse when it
finally shuffles off to the great /dev/null in the sky.

------
slowpoke
Dear Adobe: just kill Flash already, for good. The world (wide web) will be a
better place.

~~~
Shank
In effect they are. No android support, now nothing except Chrome support on
Linux. I'd assume that if my theory is true, Mac OS X will take a similar
route(why it didn't happen first is beyond me) before Windows finally meets a
similarly gimped fate.

~~~
notatoad
Don't forget that windows is already taking their own steps in this direction
with the IE10 metro mode.

------
yabai
Wow. I remember waiting for flash to come to 64 bit Linux systems...

Perhaps Adobe has to continue supporting Chrome to support Googles
Chromebooks.

In a perfect world, we would have open standards and would never need to rely
on a company. Hopefully flash will die quickly (I wish I had a dollar for
everytime I have heard this).

~~~
bzbarsky
Based on other comments in this thread, it sounds like less of "Adobe
supporting Chrome" than "Google using its source license for Flash to keep
supporting Chrome on Linux". And yes, presumably at least in part due to
Chromebooks.

------
enkrs
In that case I realy hope to see this site change soon:
<https://wiki.mozilla.org/NPAPI:Pepper>

~~~
gcp
Apple and Mozilla have already stated that Pepper is entirely redundant with
ongoing standardization efforts and even counterproductive to them. So why is
Google pushing it? Answer for yourself.

~~~
Erwin
Apple's initial third-party app system in the iPhone was web-based.

While WebOS stuck with the open technologies, the next Apple phone introduced
closed-source binary application as the main third party extension platform.
If WebOS could make the open web technologies work as primary development
method on a phone, why did Apple go back to the installable programs of the
last century?

Google's Pepper is at least open standard with an open implementation, while I
don't have any way to run iOS apps on any other platform than those tightly
controlled by Apple themselves.

Strangely, we can look to Microsoft for providing an open standards HTML5
based version of an app like "Cut the Rope": <http://www.cuttherope.ie/> \--
imagine if iOS devices ran HTML5 apps well and this game (which sold 3 million
copies on iOS!) was HTML5 from the start. You could run it on the iPhone or
any Android device or your desktop right from the start.

------
coffeeaddicted
The part I'm not yet getting about Pepper - does it only support those native
client objects as described here? <https://developers.google.com/native-
client/overview>

Or do plugins like flash have the choice between native client and just using
a shared library as they did and Pepper also supports that?

In the first case it would basically mean that flash would run sandboxed (and
maybe on every system supported by Pepper, so once ARM support is added it
could run there as well again). But probably with some speed-hit (~5%
according to the documentation)

~~~
justinschuh
We use Pepper to sandbox some fully native plugins, where NaCl is not yet a
good option due to things like codebase incompatibilities and startup
performance. Two examples of this are the native PDF reader (on all platforms)
and Flash on Chrome OS.

------
paulrouget
<https://github.com/mozilla/shumway>

> Shumway is an HTML5 technology experiment that explores building a faithful
> and efficient renderer for the SWF file format without native code
> assistance.

> Shumway is community-driven and supported by Mozilla. Our goal is to create
> a general-purpose, web standards-based platform for parsing and rendering
> SWFs. Integration with Firefox is a possibility if the experiment proves
> successful.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
I've been following that project and there's a lot of activity on it. So I
wouldn't be surprised if they have something working in 6 months or so. I can
see this being useful when flash becomes a strictly legacy technology.

------
melling
Why is there so much noise over this? How many times does Flash have to die?
Yes, the Flash plugin will be with us for another decade, but shouldn't most
of us have moved on? I uninstalled Flash on my two Macs in December. I'm doing
fine so far. Sometimes, I need to switch over to Chrome for video, but so far
I'm not missing it.

~~~
Tichy
I have relatives on Linux and this will complicate things for me. Basically I
have to install Chrome and explain why videos and other stuff work only on
Chrome. However, it is the way I prefer it by now anyway: use a Firefox
without Flash for daily browsing and Chrome for Flash things.

Don't underestimate how complicated it might be to explain this to "noobs",
though.

~~~
bzbarsky
> Basically I have to install Chrome and explain why videos > and other stuff
> work only on Chrome.

Starting 5 years from now, when Adobe actually drops support for Flash on
Linux, right?

We'll see how much video and other stuff still requires Flash in 5 years. With
any luck, not much.

~~~
Tichy
Missed the timeline. In five years, Flash should be gone for good.

------
nakkiel
I think it's reasonable to assume that Adobe wants to kill Flash on GNU/Linux,
but can't yet do it for Chrome due to some engagement with Google. If this is
really their intent, they are going to have much more trouble justifying a
kill operation on other platforms.

I forsee a slow and painful death for Flash.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
It's only been about a year since the flash plugin started assuming any sort
of stability. Did Adobe just find Linux too hard to implement on?

~~~
ConceptJunkie
Given that it took them something like 5 years to make a 64-bit version, I
would imagine that Flash is such a mass of spaghetti code that, yes, they did
find Linux too hard.

------
moondowner
So, Google agreed to make Flash on Linux available only via Chrome? Damn...

But, if major Linux browsers implement Pepper API, on the other hand it will
mean that we (the users) won't have to bother installing (deb/rpm/etc)
packages every now or then. Maybe it will turn out better.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
So Google really are evil after all.

~~~
ConceptJunkie
On the whole I don't think this is evil. More of a lateral move, morally.

I can't imagine what Google hopes to accomplish with this since Flash is
currently circling the drain, relevancy-wise, but if it does anything to
hasten the move away from using Flash at all, then it's a plus.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
So Google is not evil because forcing Adobe to remove flash support from other
'vendors' browsers is actually a good thing? Basically Google knows best and
anyone who thinks that they might actually want to continue to use flash on
Linux in a non-Google browser (or at least without installing Chrome) is
wrong?

This looks like the sort of heavy-handed monopoly activity that made Microsoft
so great.

It's possible that Adobe were intending to cease all Linux-based browser
support and Google prevented that by buying back Chrome support; in which case
Google has slipped in their PR big time.

------
tikhonj
This comes at a fine time--I've not been using flash at all. The only site
that I regularly used flash for in the past was YouTube, and then only for
some videos (the ones with ads). The open source Gnash plugin can play YouTube
videos that require flash (it's useless for almost everything else--it can't
even play YouTube's ads :P). All the videos that work with HTML5 are better
that way. (In a pinch, Gnash would work there too.)

So really, the only things I'm missing are flash games I don't play and ads I
don't watch. (Some flash games actually sort of work, but it's not
dependable.)

~~~
chimeracoder
Didn't Google actually allow you to watch Youtube videos with HTML5 instead of
flash?

~~~
Ralith
Not the ones with ads.

~~~
ugh
I can watch every single YouTube video. I recently did a fresh install of OS X
and have not yet bothered to install Flash (it's no longer installed by
default). Every single YouTube video I want to play I can play. Those that
used to have ads no longer have them.

The only YouTube videos I occasionally can't watch are the embedded ones.
Clicking through to the YouTube page, however, solves that problem.

------
figital
To my fellow developers, please don't develop anything else for Flash. Thanks!
(Within the next year Google will have you go full screen in GTK inside
Chrome/Debian ... then that's your desktop ... Adobe is hedging this decent
bet .... BARF!)

~~~
psquid
> Within the next year Google will have you go full screen in GTK inside
> Chrome/Debian ... then that's your desktop

Source? Or is that just conjecture?

------
scythe
The one thing where Flash is still apparently unavoidable is something like
tinychat.com (or chatroulette) which does web-based videoconferencing. The
last time I checked, it isn't possible to replicate that without Flash.

~~~
justinschuh
WebRTC <[http://www.webrtc.org/>](http://www.webrtc.org/>); development is
ongoing between Google, Mozilla, and Opera. You can try it out in the latest
Chrome canary/dev channel.

------
donniezazen
Good riddance. Flash has never been anything but trouble for Linux. It
consumes huge amount of power on Linux and they are not inclined to fix it.
Hopefully we will see better HTML5 support in future.

------
unabridged
I've been living flash-free for about 6 months, now that youtube autoloads
html5 video the only thing pissing me off on a regular basis are the charts on
Google Finance and Yahoo Finance.

------
mrbill
All I see lately is that Flash is becoming less and less relevant. It's not on
iOS; I purposefully didn't install it on my latest Android devices.

------
zmmmmm
Is it really Chrome or is it the new "pepper" plugin API driving this?

ie. if other browsers decide to support the new plugin API, will Adobe also
support them too?

~~~
tyleregeto
The API was developed jointly by Adobe and Chrome, so its not Chrome or the
API causing it, it's both parties wanting a better solution. It makes it
cheaper for Adobe to support more platforms with less development hours.

Adobe has stated (not in any press releases, but from the mouth of employees)
that they will work with any other browser wanting to implement the same API.

------
hub_
Now it is time that Google do the right thing and drop Flash, as well as hold
their over a year-old promise to drop H264 in Chrome.

Not holding my breath though.

------
trevorgerhardt
Anyone else shocked to see that they were still using a "Netscape plugin API"?
How many years old is that?

------
hmart
Flash player is the worst CPU hog in my Linux and Mac computers. But, could we
live without it? I doubt.

------
lwhi
This announcement further convinces me that Flash is gearing down to
obsolescence.

~~~
ConceptJunkie
Indeed. I've run FlashBlock for years, and minus Hulu and a couple other
sites, I find I almost never have a need to click on the blocked Flash
objects.

And it seems like the days of sites implemented entirely in Flash have pretty
much come to an end.

Given the nature of Flash I could never understand why it was so much trouble
to implement on Linux, or to create a 64-bit version. I can't imagine what a
colossal mass of spaghetti code that app must be. I've been waiting
impatiently for it to die since at least 2001.

------
pi18n
That's good. In Chrome, when Flash crashes, it only takes out a couple of
tabs.

------
alanh
I laughed out loud — shocking how different Adobe’s headline and the HN
submission title are!

"Adobe and Google Partnering for Flash Player on Linux" — zzZZZ, good for them

"Flash For Linux Will Only Be Available For Chrome" — Holy balls, Flash is
really dying, isn’t it?

------
brudgers
Unsurprising, both products are provided free in order to facilitate the
tracking of users, and I suspect that the vast majority of users do not turn
off Flash cookies.

So long as Google's Youtube defaults to Flash, it's a case of mutual
interests.

------
jejones3141
Trying to keep the tinfoil hat off, but... when I tried to post a comment on
the Adobe blog asking whether Linux is being singled out in this respect and
if so, why, I got a database error.

------
mapleoin
Just reminded me to uninstall my flash-plugin.

------
silon3
Bye flash. Welcome flash alternatives. And downloading/torrenting even more
videos.

------
njharman
Works for me.

------
tosseraccount
Adios flash ads! Hello html5 ads. _sigh_

------
drivebyacct2
I'm surprised that everyone seem to think that this is some sort of exclusive
Chrome thing. I'm willing to bet that this is more from Adobe's inability to
understand how to do auto-updates correctly and the fact that Chrome is the
only browser to support Pepper.

Adobe gets free auto-updates and there is no hassle or extra steps for users,
since there is only one way for them to effectively use it. I'm sure if
Firefox were to support Pepper that they would make it available in a PPA or
something.

~~~
drivebyacct2
Sorry, didn't mean to detract from the Google haterade.

------
nodata
Good. So now I don't have to use it anymore.

------
dave_sullivan
_Btw, really? Downvote me but you've got nothing to say?_

To weigh in on the pro flash side: say you're developing applications for
large enterprises, many of which still run ie7 or 8 (mind you, not websites,
but applications that run in a browser and are delivered over the Internet).
Since HTML5 (by which, none of you actually mean html5 in that case, it's
mostly some kind of JavaScript front end with frameworks far from mature
(though I like both backbone and ember/sproutcore, they've got a ways to go
before being comparable to flex w/ robot legs, and js will never be as3)) will
not work well in this situation, what do you propose?

For Adobe's part, I wish they'd be a bit more transparent, but regardless, I
think I'm good to go with a pretty wide and stable cross-browser feature set
today and will be that way for a while while JS frameworks play catch up. And
meanwhile, good luck getting an IT dept at a fortune 500 to upgrade all their
browsers to the latest version of firefox or chrome and to make that a
requirement to use your software. And what would you gain by doing that today
exactly if that's your target market?

What can HTML5/JS do today for RIA's that flash can't do better, faster, and
cheaper?

