

Chrome 20 Takes Over Adobe Flash On Linux - mdesantis
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTEyNzc

======
freehunter
This is good news for Flash, but it does make me sad. Not because it means
Flash will continue to be around, but because I really don't like Chrome on
Linux.

Don't get me wrong, I love Chrome. I use it on Windows all the time. But Linux
has this little niggle I can't stand with default browser behavior: Firefox
calls it "browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll". And Firefox allows you to change
that to true or false.

I'm not often changing small bits of a URL; when I click the URL bar it's for
the specific intent of removing what is there and replacing it with something
completely different. I understand the arguments for both use cases. Firefox
does as well. The Chrome developers don't. In searching their bug tracker, you
find the Chrome guys don't consider this a bug [1] (it's really not) but worse
yet, don't plan on having the option to change this behavior. That's poor
customer service, and inconsistent with Chrome on Windows. When I switch
between OSes as often as I do, the last thing I want to worry about is how my
browser will behave on this machine vs that one.

So now if/when I want to use Flash, I have to switch from Firefox to Chrome.
When I'm done using Flash, I have to switch back. Google, please... please
don't tell me about your keyboard shortcuts, don't tell me to click three
times, don't tell me to click and drag... if you're making me use your
browser, let me use it the way I want to. The way it works on Windows or even
in Firefox.

[1] <https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=26140>

~~~
SkyMarshal
_Do not try and bend the spoon. That is impossible. Instead, only try and
realize the truth - there is no spoon. Then you will see it is not the spoon
that bends, it is only yourself._

Eg - when you can't adapt the world to yourself, adapt yourself to the world.
Don't get emotionally affected by every little annoyance in the world and
especially technology, that way madness lies.

Eg - pick a workaround, go with it, habitualize it, then move on. Personally I
like click address bar, then almost simultaneously CTRL+a. tjoff's ALT-d is
awesome too, didn't know about that one.

~~~
nkurz
_Don't get emotionally affected by every little annoyance in the world and
especially technology, that way madness lies._

Madness, but occasionally madness and change. The OP and his angry cohort are
trading their collective sanity for thousands of mostly invisible minor
improvements that make the world a better place.

I mainly use Chrome on Mac, but also hate this behavior. Yes, clicking on an
insertion point, cussing, and using Ctrl-A works if I want to select the
beginning of the URL, but if I wanted to do this I would have stuck with the
keyboard and not bothered carefully selecting my insertion point.

Rage on OP!

------
azakai
This is exactly why relying on plugins and closed-source components for the
web is dangerous. Adobe can just decide to stop supporting a platform (Linux),
and only companies partnering with Adobe (Google) get to keep using Flash.

------
qznc
Does that include a fix for the smurf bug?

[https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3109467](https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3109467)

Unfortunatelly, the last and final release of Adobe Flash for Linux has a bug,
which shuffles the colors in Youtube videos. So far it seemed they never fix
that.

~~~
jiggy2011
You can fix that by disabling hardware acceleration.

Right click on a flash element -> settings -> untick

~~~
kaolinite
Took me 3 months of hallucinogenic youtube videos for me to discover that.

------
Tichy
What will happen to Flash on the Ubuntu LTS releases? Will it be automatically
removed at some point?

~~~
trotsky
Adobe is still providing bugfix versions of the 11.2 tree for NPAPI linux.

------
naner
Phoronix is currently down, but there wasn't much to this story to begin with:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.pho...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.phoronix.com/vr.php%3Fview%3DMTEyNzc&hl=en&prmd=imvns&strip=1)

 _Google's Chrome web-browser reached version 20 yesterday and for Linux users
this marks the point that the web company has taken over Flash Player support
on Linux from Adobe using its PPAPI implementation.

As shared back in February, Adobe is abandoning support for Flash Player on
Linux. However, they are allowing Google to continue the Flash Linux support
via a PPAPI (Pepper) plug-in, which right now is a plug-in API only
implemented by the Chrome/Chromium web-browser.

In March Adobe pushed out the last major Linux update meanwhile today with
Chrome 20 we have the Google-maintained Flash by default for Linux x86 and
x86_64 users.

The Google Chrome 20 release announcement can be found on their blog, but it's
not too exciting. Aside from supporting the new Flash implementation for Linux
users, there's bug-fixes and the usual round of other enhancements._

------
chao-
Crossing my fingers that Chromium will stop finally yelling at me about my
outdated* Flash.

*While providing a helpful link to solutions that don't work.

~~~
kintamanimatt
Yes, it stops moaning and groaning about that in v20.

On a side note, Google Chrome/Chromium's at version 20 already?

~~~
mas1n
Welcome to the infinite version.

[http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-infinite-
versio...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-infinite-version.html)

~~~
kintamanimatt
I'm actually looking forward to running a v100 piece of software. I don't
think I've ever seen software reach that monumental milestone, although I
expect I will next year.

I wonder whether Firefox or Chrome will win the race.

------
mrlase
For what its worth, I have an Nvidia card and am running Ubuntu 12.04:
Chrome's Flash plugin does not work very well on the latest dev build; it has
some weird issue with playing flash at double speed or something. I had to
switch back to Adobe's flash plugin until this issue is resolved... This could
potentially be hardware specific in my case, but, just wanted to let others
know that Adobe's plugin still works.

~~~
fkn
I've experienced the same issues. Some sites, like Udacity, is borderline
broken for me. I applaud the effort to move off the Adobe plugin, but it's
important to remember that to the end user, we just really care about how well
it works. In the meantime, I've gone back to using Firefox.

------
eiji
Google is so invested in Flash at this point. Why don't they just take
over/buy "Flash" with it's engineers from Adobe? Probably hard to separate
them from the Air team and all the other "products" from Adobe.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Are they really? I'd say they are far more invested in WebKit, HTML5 and Java.

~~~
panacea
The only things I can think of are Flash in YouTube provides far more control
over playback for things like downloading, ad delivery etc.

But fundamentally... Street View. I can't see how that will be delivered with
high performance by HTML5 any time soon.

~~~
jiggy2011
It doesn't seem that unlikely, street view is mostly a fancy slideshow.

~~~
recursive
It does some pretty sweet 3d-aware image manipulation. I wouldn't call that a
slide show.

~~~
jiggy2011
On the client end?

~~~
recursive
Yes.

------
randomfool
Does this mean Flash is being executed in the native client sandbox as well?
If so, hooray! (and can we enable this on other platforms)?

~~~
cpeterso
No. Adobe has stopped supporting Flash for Linux. Google has announced that
they continue to maintain Flash for Linux, but only for Chrome. Google has
been bundling Flash with Chrome for a while, so this announcement is simply
that Google won't stop doing what they've already been doing.

------
jtsagata
For one happy moment i was expecting a working open source implementation.
Then i crashed on the ground...

~~~
hippich
I played yesterday with some SVG demos again and with Raphael JS library. We
need to invest more efforts into open source technology instead of trying to
patch existing proprietary and inefficient solution.

------
usablebytes
what is this news? can somebody read and try to explain me/all what exactly is
happening here?

~~~
nodata
iirc Adobe has dropped NPAPI support for browsers on Linux, leaving Chrome on
Linux as the only browser that support the new PPAPI interface.

So if you want to use new versions of Flash on Linux, you have to use Chrome.

~~~
makomk
Obviously Chromium supports PPAPI too, but as far as I can tell the PPAPI
version of Flash isn't available for it so the official Google-branded Chrome
releases really are the only option for Flash on Linux.

~~~
obtu
The only option to get _newer_ versions of the Adobe plugin. The 11.2 branch
will get security updates into 2017 (2012-03-27 + 5 years):
[https://blogs.adobe.com/flashplayer/2012/02/adobe-and-
google...](https://blogs.adobe.com/flashplayer/2012/02/adobe-and-google-
partnering-for-flash-player-on-linux.html)

------
kayoone
Hopefully this will lead other browser makers to integrate Native Client as
well which would lead to a world free of browser-plugins!

~~~
mccr8
Native Client Flash isn't available for Chromium, which obviously implements
NaCl, so I don't see why other browser makes implementing NaCl would let them
use NaCl Flash.

~~~
obtu
PPAPI flash works in Chromium, scan this thread (unless that was your point).
It's just that the fully open-source browsers aren't interested in setting up
a distribution channel for it.

