10 ms·

Flash For Linux Will Only Be Available For Chrome

240 points by hotice 15y ago

k33n 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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 15y ago
    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 15y ago
      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 15y ago
        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.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
- dchest 15y ago
  Except that other browser users won't be able to acquire Flash Player without installing Chrome: 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
  - orblivion 15y ago
    And again, couldn't Firefox at least theoretically implement this part of the API? Would it just be a legal issue?
    - chalst 15y ago
      The announcement says: > Because of this work, Adobe has been able to partner with Google in providing a “Pepper” implementation of Flash Player for all x86/64 platforms supported by the Google Chrome browser. Google will begin distributing this new Pepper-based Flash Player as part of Chrome on all platforms, including Linux, later this year. It says that the plug-in will be bundled with Chrome, and Adobe have said they won't be releasing more Flash players for Linux, but the announcement does not even hint whether a stand-alone Pepper plug-in will be available from Google. I hope the Chromium blog will clarify this in due course. I guess Adobe might forbid Google from developing a plug-in, but I don't see why they would want that, seeing as they have been distributing plug-ins for years. If Google could but didn't, that would make them look unsupportive of Chromium.
- bzbarsky 15y ago
  If I understand things correctly, there are actually two things going on: 1) Adobe is effectively stopping work on Flash for Linux on their end; it's just not worth it to them. 2) Google is going to support Flash for Linux for Chrome specifically. They can do this because they have access to Flash source and because the Pepper version of the plug-in is much more cross-platform than the NPAPI version, so the support effort is not too great. Given that they already ship a modified Flash, not the stock one, it's not that big a difference from what they're already doing. So I think you're wrong; even if other browsers implemented the Pepper API, they would also need source licenses from Adobe or would be dependent on Google to get the Flash plug-in.
enkrs 15y ago
In that case I realy hope to see this site change soon: https://wiki.mozilla.org/NPAPI:Pepper https://wiki.mozilla.org/NPAPI:Pepper
- gcp 15y ago
  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 15y ago
    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/ 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.
bwarp 15y ago
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.
- gexla 15y ago
  Or just maybe any improvement makes Flash usable on Linux without crashing the browser. People might actually start enabling Flash on Linux if that happens.
  - bwarp 15y ago
    I'll give you that. It's one of the reasons I don't have the flash plugin installed.
  - ConceptJunkie 15y ago
    I don't find Flash crashing my browser on Linux too often, but it crashes itself pretty regularly. Plus the older hardware I run Linux on can barely show a 288p Hulu video, with lots of stuttering, even though the machine can play videos twice that resolution flawlessly in any of the native video players.
    - cookiecaper 15y ago
      >I don't find Flash crashing my browser on Linux too often, but it crashes itself pretty regularly. Before recentish versions of Firefox, a Flash crash would bring down the whole browser.
  - drivebyacct2 15y ago
    I've used Chrome since it was available for Linux and I've never once had Flash take down the entire browser. In fact, I can't say I've ever had a Flash crash at all in Chrome. Funny enough it crashes rather frequently in Firefox (still doesn't crash the browser itself though...)
raphinou 15y ago
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.
- ecaron 15y ago
  Adobe killing AIR for Linux didn't impact/slow AIR's growth in the slightest, so I would have to assume this change will also have zero impact.
  - drats 15y ago
    Can't tell if you are serious. Who uses AIR? I've never seen it.
    - winthrowe 15y ago
      Grooveshark's desktop app used it. Only place I've personally seen it in the wild.
      - gcp 15y ago
        Simfy (another Spotify competitor) also uses it.
    - tbassetto 15y ago
      http://www.balsamiq.com http://www.balsamiq.com is a popular software among people doing wireframes. The Desktop version is based on AIR (and it's the only reason why I've installed AIR on my Mac).
    - pbhjpbhj 15y ago
      BBC use it for their iPlayer app (well hidden though) so I imagine the UK installation base of Air to be pretty large in comparison to other regions.
    - shawabawa 15y ago
      the League of Legends client uses it. It's also one of the buggiest game clients I've ever used...
mapleoin 15y ago
Just reminded me to uninstall my flash-plugin.
tosseraccount 15y ago
Adios flash ads! Hello html5 ads. sigh
moondowner 15y ago
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.
- rplnt 15y ago
  I guess the Google is initiator of this project and thus won't care (will make adobe not care) about other browsers implementing this API. Just another step in pushing Chrome down everyone's throat.
- pbhjpbhj 15y ago
  So Google really are evil after all.
  - ConceptJunkie 15y ago
    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.
    - coffeeaddicted 15y ago
      I think Pepper also supports their native client applications (x86 code which runs in a sandbox) and google probably would like to see that more used.
    - pbhjpbhj 15y ago
      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.
nakkiel 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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 15y ago
    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.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
ootachi 15y ago
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/000088.html https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/plugin-futures/2010-April... The thread (which continues into May) goes over pretty clearly why they felt Pepper was a bad idea.
- MatthewPhillips 15y ago
  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 15y ago
    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 15y ago
      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.
      - jaredsohn 15y ago
        My assumption is that among {NPAPI/Windows, NPAPI/Linux, PPAPI/Windows, PPAPI/Linux}, NPAPI/Linux provides the least value for the work required.
nodata 15y ago
Good. So now I don't have to use it anymore.
slowpoke 15y ago
Dear Adobe: just kill Flash already, for good. The world (wide web) will be a better place.
- Shank 15y ago
  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.
  - bzbarsky 15y ago
    Mac OS X probably didn't happen first because there are way more desktop Mac OS X users than there are desktop Linux users...
  - notatoad 15y ago
    Don't forget that windows is already taking their own steps in this direction with the IE10 metro mode.
- pooriaazimi 15y ago
  I'll rephrase that: F* Adobe: just kill Flash already, for good. The world (wide web) will be a better place. I feel absolutely no love for Adobe. Flash was a great technology and Macromedia was a dream company (at least for 14-year old me). They ruined Flash and other Macromedia inventions after taking over. I truly wish Adobe dies alongside Flash. And Oracle also.
- notatoad 15y ago
  I think it's safe to assume they've already killed it. Web developers can no longer make a reasonable assumption that their users will have flash, therefore flash is no longer a useful general purpose tool. It'll stick around for a long time yet due to enterprise and other lazy programmers, but for wide-audience web content flash is dead.
lwhi 15y ago
This announcement further convinces me that Flash is gearing down to obsolescence.
- ConceptJunkie 15y ago
  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.
paulrouget 15y ago
https://github.com/mozilla/shumway 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 15y ago
  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.
silon3 15y ago
Bye flash. Welcome flash alternatives. And downloading/torrenting even more videos.
jejones3141 15y ago
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.
gcp 15y ago
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?
- buster 15y ago
  Where does Adobe declare Flash on the desktop dead?
  - ugh 15y ago
    In the same place where they declare mobile (a bit of a misnomer, tablets aren't exactly mobile, not much more than notebooks anyway) Flash dead. Flash is appealing because it has features HTML/CSS/JS do not have and because everyone on every platform has it. Since mobile devices are becoming ever more important and Flash is not supported on those devices (or will not be) the second part of that sentence is no longer true. Conclusion: Flash is dead. We will have to deal with it for years but it's on its way out. A web technology that will not work on mobile devices has no future.
    - buster 15y ago
      I may agree, but you didn't show where _Adobe_ states this for the _desktop_ ... If you were on Wikipedia you'd see a [Citation needed] here.
    - Fargren 15y ago
      They never did that. They declared the Flash Player for mobile dead. but it's still very viable to make Flash applications for mobile, using AIR.
      - tyleregeto 15y ago
fckinfoodies1 15y ago
http://fckfoodies.com/ http://fckfoodies.com/
unabridged 15y ago
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.
yabai 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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.
brudgers 15y ago
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.
coffeeaddicted 15y ago
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 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)
- obtu 15y ago
  NaCL would probably have been mentioned if it was involved. I think Chrome can still do less fine-grained, OS-assisted sandboxing, and Flash on Pepper is cooperating with that.
- justinschuh 15y ago
  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.
melling 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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 15y ago
    > 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 15y ago
      Missed the timeline. In five years, Flash should be gone for good.
figital 15y ago
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 15y ago
  > 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?
dave_sullivan 15y ago
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?
scythe 15y ago
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.
- gcp 15y ago
  http://www.webrtc.org/ http://www.webrtc.org/
- justinschuh 15y ago
  WebRTC <http://www.webrtc.org/&#62 http://www.webrtc.org/> development is ongoing between Google, Mozilla, and Opera. You can try it out in the latest Chrome canary/dev channel.
radarsat1 15y ago
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.
- sebastianavina 15y ago
  It could be hard coded into the browsers like javascript.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - hub_ 15y ago
    Like Shumway? https://github.com/mozilla/shumway https://github.com/mozilla/shumway This is an effort to render SFW inside the browser.
tikhonj 15y ago
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 15y ago
  Didn't Google actually allow you to watch Youtube videos with HTML5 instead of flash?
  - Ralith 15y ago
    Not the ones with ads.
    - ugh 15y ago
      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.
hmart 15y ago
Flash player is the worst CPU hog in my Linux and Mac computers. But, could we live without it? I doubt.
alanh 15y ago
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?
drivebyacct2 15y ago
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 15y ago
  Sorry, didn't mean to detract from the Google haterade.
donniezazen 15y ago
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.
hub_ 15y ago
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.
mrbill 15y ago
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 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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.
trevorgerhardt 15y ago
Anyone else shocked to see that they were still using a "Netscape plugin API"? How many years old is that?
pi18n 15y ago
That's good. In Chrome, when Flash crashes, it only takes out a couple of tabs.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
njharman 15y ago
Works for me.

240 points by hotice 15y ago

k33n 15y ago

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 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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 15y ago
    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 15y ago
      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.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
dchest 15y ago
Except that other browser users won't be able to acquire Flash Player without installing Chrome: 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
- orblivion 15y ago
  And again, couldn't Firefox at least theoretically implement this part of the API? Would it just be a legal issue?
  - chalst 15y ago
    The announcement says: > Because of this work, Adobe has been able to partner with Google in providing a “Pepper” implementation of Flash Player for all x86/64 platforms supported by the Google Chrome browser. Google will begin distributing this new Pepper-based Flash Player as part of Chrome on all platforms, including Linux, later this year. It says that the plug-in will be bundled with Chrome, and Adobe have said they won't be releasing more Flash players for Linux, but the announcement does not even hint whether a stand-alone Pepper plug-in will be available from Google. I hope the Chromium blog will clarify this in due course. I guess Adobe might forbid Google from developing a plug-in, but I don't see why they would want that, seeing as they have been distributing plug-ins for years. If Google could but didn't, that would make them look unsupportive of Chromium.
bzbarsky 15y ago
If I understand things correctly, there are actually two things going on: 1) Adobe is effectively stopping work on Flash for Linux on their end; it's just not worth it to them. 2) Google is going to support Flash for Linux for Chrome specifically. They can do this because they have access to Flash source and because the Pepper version of the plug-in is much more cross-platform than the NPAPI version, so the support effort is not too great. Given that they already ship a modified Flash, not the stock one, it's not that big a difference from what they're already doing. So I think you're wrong; even if other browsers implemented the Pepper API, they would also need source licenses from Adobe or would be dependent on Google to get the Flash plug-in.

enkrs 15y ago

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

gcp 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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/ 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.

bwarp 15y ago

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.

gexla 15y ago
Or just maybe any improvement makes Flash usable on Linux without crashing the browser. People might actually start enabling Flash on Linux if that happens.
- bwarp 15y ago
  I'll give you that. It's one of the reasons I don't have the flash plugin installed.
- ConceptJunkie 15y ago
  I don't find Flash crashing my browser on Linux too often, but it crashes itself pretty regularly. Plus the older hardware I run Linux on can barely show a 288p Hulu video, with lots of stuttering, even though the machine can play videos twice that resolution flawlessly in any of the native video players.
  - cookiecaper 15y ago
    >I don't find Flash crashing my browser on Linux too often, but it crashes itself pretty regularly. Before recentish versions of Firefox, a Flash crash would bring down the whole browser.
- drivebyacct2 15y ago
  I've used Chrome since it was available for Linux and I've never once had Flash take down the entire browser. In fact, I can't say I've ever had a Flash crash at all in Chrome. Funny enough it crashes rather frequently in Firefox (still doesn't crash the browser itself though...)

raphinou 15y ago

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.

ecaron 15y ago
Adobe killing AIR for Linux didn't impact/slow AIR's growth in the slightest, so I would have to assume this change will also have zero impact.
- drats 15y ago
  Can't tell if you are serious. Who uses AIR? I've never seen it.
  - winthrowe 15y ago
    Grooveshark's desktop app used it. Only place I've personally seen it in the wild.
    - gcp 15y ago
      Simfy (another Spotify competitor) also uses it.
  - tbassetto 15y ago
    http://www.balsamiq.com http://www.balsamiq.com is a popular software among people doing wireframes. The Desktop version is based on AIR (and it's the only reason why I've installed AIR on my Mac).
  - pbhjpbhj 15y ago
    BBC use it for their iPlayer app (well hidden though) so I imagine the UK installation base of Air to be pretty large in comparison to other regions.
  - shawabawa 15y ago
    the League of Legends client uses it. It's also one of the buggiest game clients I've ever used...

mapleoin 15y ago

Just reminded me to uninstall my flash-plugin.

tosseraccount 15y ago

Adios flash ads! Hello html5 ads. sigh

moondowner 15y ago

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.

rplnt 15y ago
I guess the Google is initiator of this project and thus won't care (will make adobe not care) about other browsers implementing this API. Just another step in pushing Chrome down everyone's throat.
pbhjpbhj 15y ago
So Google really are evil after all.
- ConceptJunkie 15y ago
  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.
  - coffeeaddicted 15y ago
    I think Pepper also supports their native client applications (x86 code which runs in a sandbox) and google probably would like to see that more used.
  - pbhjpbhj 15y ago
    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.

nakkiel 15y ago

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 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

ootachi 15y ago

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/000088.html https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/plugin-futures/2010-April... The thread (which continues into May) goes over pretty clearly why they felt Pepper was a bad idea.

MatthewPhillips 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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 15y ago
    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.
    - jaredsohn 15y ago
      My assumption is that among {NPAPI/Windows, NPAPI/Linux, PPAPI/Windows, PPAPI/Linux}, NPAPI/Linux provides the least value for the work required.

nodata 15y ago

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

slowpoke 15y ago

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

Shank 15y ago
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.
- bzbarsky 15y ago
  Mac OS X probably didn't happen first because there are way more desktop Mac OS X users than there are desktop Linux users...
- notatoad 15y ago
  Don't forget that windows is already taking their own steps in this direction with the IE10 metro mode.
pooriaazimi 15y ago
I'll rephrase that: F* Adobe: just kill Flash already, for good. The world (wide web) will be a better place. I feel absolutely no love for Adobe. Flash was a great technology and Macromedia was a dream company (at least for 14-year old me). They ruined Flash and other Macromedia inventions after taking over. I truly wish Adobe dies alongside Flash. And Oracle also.
notatoad 15y ago
I think it's safe to assume they've already killed it. Web developers can no longer make a reasonable assumption that their users will have flash, therefore flash is no longer a useful general purpose tool. It'll stick around for a long time yet due to enterprise and other lazy programmers, but for wide-audience web content flash is dead.

lwhi 15y ago

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

ConceptJunkie 15y ago
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.

paulrouget 15y ago

https://github.com/mozilla/shumway 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 15y ago
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.

silon3 15y ago

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

jejones3141 15y ago

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.

gcp 15y ago

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?

buster 15y ago
Where does Adobe declare Flash on the desktop dead?
- ugh 15y ago
  In the same place where they declare mobile (a bit of a misnomer, tablets aren't exactly mobile, not much more than notebooks anyway) Flash dead. Flash is appealing because it has features HTML/CSS/JS do not have and because everyone on every platform has it. Since mobile devices are becoming ever more important and Flash is not supported on those devices (or will not be) the second part of that sentence is no longer true. Conclusion: Flash is dead. We will have to deal with it for years but it's on its way out. A web technology that will not work on mobile devices has no future.
  - buster 15y ago
    I may agree, but you didn't show where _Adobe_ states this for the _desktop_ ... If you were on Wikipedia you'd see a [Citation needed] here.
  - Fargren 15y ago
    They never did that. They declared the Flash Player for mobile dead. but it's still very viable to make Flash applications for mobile, using AIR.
    - tyleregeto 15y ago

fckinfoodies1 15y ago

http://fckfoodies.com/ http://fckfoodies.com/

unabridged 15y ago

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.

yabai 15y ago

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 15y ago
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.

brudgers 15y ago

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.

coffeeaddicted 15y ago

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 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)

obtu 15y ago
NaCL would probably have been mentioned if it was involved. I think Chrome can still do less fine-grained, OS-assisted sandboxing, and Flash on Pepper is cooperating with that.
justinschuh 15y ago
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.

melling 15y ago

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 15y ago
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 15y ago
  > 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 15y ago
    Missed the timeline. In five years, Flash should be gone for good.

figital 15y ago

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 15y ago
> 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?

dave_sullivan 15y ago

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?

scythe 15y ago

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.

gcp 15y ago
http://www.webrtc.org/ http://www.webrtc.org/
justinschuh 15y ago
WebRTC <http://www.webrtc.org/&#62 http://www.webrtc.org/> development is ongoing between Google, Mozilla, and Opera. You can try it out in the latest Chrome canary/dev channel.

radarsat1 15y ago

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.

sebastianavina 15y ago
It could be hard coded into the browsers like javascript.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- hub_ 15y ago
  Like Shumway? https://github.com/mozilla/shumway https://github.com/mozilla/shumway This is an effort to render SFW inside the browser.

tikhonj 15y ago

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 15y ago
Didn't Google actually allow you to watch Youtube videos with HTML5 instead of flash?
- Ralith 15y ago
  Not the ones with ads.
  - ugh 15y ago
    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.

hmart 15y ago

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

alanh 15y ago

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?

drivebyacct2 15y ago

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 15y ago
Sorry, didn't mean to detract from the Google haterade.

donniezazen 15y ago

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.

hub_ 15y ago

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.

mrbill 15y ago

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 15y ago

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 15y ago
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.

trevorgerhardt 15y ago

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

pi18n 15y ago

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

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

njharman 15y ago

Works for me.