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):<p>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.<p>Now, I'd argue that these goals have now been <i>accomplished</i>. 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.<p>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 <i>keep</i> Adobe's name on the web.<p>I argue that Flash has played out its role for Adobe, and if they open source it <i>now</i> 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 <i>now</i> I think it would benefit them immensely.<p>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.
For reference, here are the thoughts of Robert O'Callahan from Mozilla (and those of Simon Fraser from Apple) on Pepper: <a href="https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/plugin-futures/2010-April/000088.html" rel="nofollow">https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/plugin-futures/2010-April...</a><p>The thread (which continues into May) goes over pretty clearly why they felt Pepper was a bad idea.
I can't make much sense of this. Adobe declared Flash dead. Apple declared Flash dead. Google declared Flash dead in Chrome for Android.<p>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?<p>What I don't even....<p>Edit: Could it be that Google is planning to release (or has released) some Linux-based appliance where Flash support is a must?
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".
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.<p>Perhaps it'll kill Flash a bit quicker considering the amount of Kiosks and Internet cafes running Firefox+Flash on Linux.
Wow. I remember waiting for flash to come to 64 bit Linux systems...<p>Perhaps Adobe has to continue supporting Chrome to support Googles Chromebooks.<p>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).
In that case I realy hope to see this site change soon: <a href="https://wiki.mozilla.org/NPAPI:Pepper" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.mozilla.org/NPAPI:Pepper</a>
The part I'm not yet getting about Pepper - does it only support those native client objects as described here? <a href="https://developers.google.com/native-client/overview" rel="nofollow">https://developers.google.com/native-client/overview</a><p>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?<p>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)
<a href="https://github.com/mozilla/shumway" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mozilla/shumway</a><p>> Shumway is an HTML5 technology experiment that explores building a faithful and efficient renderer for the SWF file format without native code assistance.<p>> 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.
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.
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.<p>I forsee a slow and painful death for Flash.
So, Google agreed to make Flash on Linux available only via Chrome? Damn...<p>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.
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.)<p>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.)
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!)
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.
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.
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.
Is it really Chrome or is it the new "pepper" plugin API driving this?<p>ie. if other browsers decide to support the new plugin API, will Adobe also support them too?
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.<p>Not holding my breath though.
I laughed out loud — shocking how different Adobe’s headline and the HN submission title are!<p>"Adobe and Google Partnering for Flash Player on Linux" — zzZZZ, good for them<p>"Flash For Linux Will Only Be Available For Chrome" — Holy balls, Flash is really dying, isn’t it?
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.<p>So long as Google's Youtube defaults to Flash, it's a case of mutual interests.
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.
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.<p>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.
<i>Btw, really? Downvote me but you've got nothing to say?</i><p>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?<p>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?<p>What can HTML5/JS do today for RIA's that flash can't do better, faster, and cheaper?