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Never meant to say that you cannot run 32bit Flash on Linux.
Also, don't think Flash 64bit needs much debugging or testing as the code base can be roughly the same. I believe 64bit will affect performance as you have to deal with slower processing. But optimizing can be done and of course 64bit processing would allow Flash to deal with larger resources and, once optimized, better results.
I still believe Adobe is trying to harm Windows in a world where Flash is still dominant, even if Silverlight is gaining traction. I don't think it's a chance that Windows and OS X has been left out (i.e. basically the whole installed desktop base, which is what Flash is aimed to...): I believe it's because of Silverlight (Win) and Apple refusing to ship Flash on iPhone (OS X). We'll see what happens.
That may have been a strategic consideration. Adobe while developing apps on Windows, is certainly a competitor to Microsoft in many ways.
I'm not sure I buy that they are specifically leaving out the player for Windows or Mac though, as far as I know there are no 64-bit mac browsers, and while Vista ships with a 64-bit version of IE, it's tucked away for safe keeping, and there is no 64-bit build of Firefox on their site.
IDK, just seems like all the demand for a 64-bit version of Flash Player is coming from the Linux guys, so it just makes sense to release it there first, and Adobe does seem to be serious about working with the open source community, especially with Flex - and other truly open source runtime libraries (even if the player is still mostly closed source). :-)




Member since:
2005-07-07
You can run 32-bit Flash on 64-bit Linux the same way you can run it on Windows x64 - just put it in a 32-bit browser (if you run Flash in Windows x64, you are running a 32-bit browser).
Additionally, on Linux you can use a plugin wrapper to run the 32-bit player in a 64-bit browser. That's the default for Ubuntu, and despite all the whining, it actually works pretty well.
I'd also bet Adobe released the 64-bit version for dual purposes - curb the whining (seriously, it's annoying), and to get some initial deployment testing from a crowd that would probably not mind doing a bit of testing with an unstable or at least less tested code base.