On my mark… Get set… Start not caring! Adobe has announced it plans to discontinue the stand-alone Flash Player for Linux, instead focussing all its effort on the version available through the Pepper API – which, besides Chrome, no one else is going to support.
Right now, Adobe provides a stand-alone version of the Flash Player Linux users can install. However, in cooperation with Google, Adobe has been working on moving the Flash Player to the Pepper API, a modified version of the NPAPI currently in use. Chrome already supports Pepper, but Mozilla has no plans to do so, and as far as I can tell, neither does Opera (if someone can correct me on Opera, please do so). The non-Pepper Linux version of the Flash Player will be discontinued.
“For Flash Player releases after 11.2, 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,” Adobe’s Mike Chambers writes, “Adobe will continue to provide security updates to non-Pepper distributions of Flash Player 11.2 on Linux for five years from its release.”
Flash Player for Windows and Mac OS X is not affected, since non-Pepper versions will still remain available for those two.
This is all part of Adobe’s effort to move away from the Flash Player. The mobile versions had already been discontinued, and step by step, the other versions will be discontinued or de-emphasized as well. With the arrival of HTML5 and Adobe’s inability to deliver acceptable performance on platforms other than Windows, Flash Player’s fate was sealed.
All the more reason to move to WebM HTML5 video.
So, the pepper API will only be used for Chrome. And Adobe will continue to develop native flash versions for Windows & Mac for other browsers.
So, how is this any less work? Instead of having Windows, Mac & Linux versions, they now have Windows, Mac & Pepper versions…
IIUC they moved from
Windows, Mac, Pepper, Linux
to
Windows, Mac, Pepper
It probably is. Instead of releasing for Linux meaning testing on Ubuntu, Fedora, Suse, etc. now they would only have to test Chrome.
Edited 2012-02-23 03:02 UTC
I’m waiting for the FreeBSD version of the Flash player 😎
Anyway, take that with a grain of salt ^^
Overall this makes me happy. I find it funny though, that just as Flash on 64-bit GNU/Linux has become usable, the entire standalone Flash product is being phased out for that OS.
And to (hopefully) forestall any conspiracy theories about how Adobe is trying to force GNU/Linux into obsolescence, please pay attention to the entire article. Specifically, the part where this is Adobe’s first step in doing away with Flash altogether. It makes sense for them to stop updates for the major OS with the least number of installs (don’t forget that a lot of GNU/Linux users don’t want or care for Flash either because it’s closed source or because they prefer WebM/HTML5 to begin with).
Also, your current installation of Flash won’t magically stop working. You just won’t get any more feature updates once this is in effect. Yet another reason to move away from a platform already plagued with security holes and bad performance.
I’m pretty sure the Mac version will be next, not only because of Apple’s stand on Flash (if they are indeed carrying Jobs’ attitude post mortem) but because it is still a smaller install base than Windows. Speaking of Windows, I wonder if Flash on that platform will end with the release of Windows 8? Especially given that Microsoft is targeting ARM as a second platform and Adobe has already discontinued Flash for ARM devices.
I don’t have flashplugin on any of my systems, so it’s non-news to me.
But I do worry for those less savvy users (say the nice lady who had her grandson install Ubuntu + everything under the sun for her) who currently have it installed, though. Sure, it’ll keep working for them after Adobe drops support for it, but what about the security aspect?
Hopefully their package management systems will automatically remove/replace Adobe’s flashplugin for them in due time.
Edited 2012-02-22 15:50 UTC
But… but… What about porn, illegal streaming, and 90% of the games running on Linux ?
Edited 2012-02-22 16:22 UTC
Install a windows vm and be happy B)
I wouldn’t bet on that… Flash player running on top of Windows in a VM sounds like a computer benchmark more than a usable software stack to me
Edited 2012-02-22 16:30 UTC
Years ago, back when the Linux flash plugin was utter crap (it was one or two major versions behind the windows counterpart) I was playing a flash MMORPG running the windows version of Firefox on wine, with the windows flash plugin.
An annoying workaround, but still far better than running a whole Windows installation just to use flash
Playing games in a VM does not make mehappy.
In general, perhaps there’s nothing inherently bad with such. XNA games work fine (many on Xbox Live Arcade; or… on WinPhone7 – but then, that’s the “snappy” platform)
I wouldn’t really mind except for the fact that a lot of websites that do use flash are setup to always push you to the newest version, which if you don’t have it installed they then won’t work.
That’s true regardless of platform.
If Adobe fixed that first (by making the stand-alone Flash on all platforms) ignore the directive (or return a value that will always work) then there will be no issues period.
Until then, if you are stuck on an old version you are more or less SOL for using it.
Free software developers will come up with a solution:
– A common interface between web browsers, the Pepper API and the Flash player.
– Work for good on an alternative to the closed-source now-discontinued Flash player (swfdec, Gnash, etc.)
Too many people need to read Flash content (Flash menus web sites, online videos, online presentations, online chat and telephone, etc.) and sometimes you badly need it and can’t wait (e.g. in a corporate environment).
I hope that this helps push Mozilla to reconsider their decision to reject Pepper; that always seemed to be a petty move to me. If only Adobe would announce plans to do the same for the Flash plugin on Windows. Sometimes it seems that only outside pressure can force Mozilla to fix the problems with Firefox.
If you really want to stop Flash, improve the W3C stuff until it becomes a viable alternative. It’s nowhere near there yet, though I would celebrate as much as the rest of you when that happens.
Practical and ideological reasons prevent Mozilla from adopting Pepper. Practical because Pepper is underspecified and only exists as a code blob and allegedly is full of Webkitisms which make it hard to integrate into other code bases. Ideological because Mozilla would rather improve the web platform and not invest developer resources into what they consider technology of the past.
Good – focus on the future whilst in the present your market is destroyed by those living in reality. Plugins are going to be with us for at least the next 5 years minimum so it is time one just got used to that fact and moved on.
As for the implementation – why do they have to whole sale ‘copy and paste’ code form webkit? why didn’t they participate in the develop and implement themselves instead of relying on someone else’s work? the complaining sounds like a person failing a test then blaming the person sitting next to them for not allowing them to copy their answers.
Edited 2012-02-23 05:26 UTC
That’s why Mozilla is still supporting NPAPI. None of the other browser vendors (including Apple) have signaled any interest in supporting Pepper currently. Mozilla might rethink their position if market pressure demands it (i.e. they are the last non-supporting browser). Right now I don’t see the necessity. Flash is still supported via NPAPI on important platforms like Windows and OS X which makes up the majority of their users.
And what other NPAPI plug-ins of note are currently required regularly apart from Flash and occasionally Java for the odd banking site?
*ring ring* 2011 called and would like to talk to you about Dart. Apparently Google isn’t as interested in cooperative standards development anymore as they used to. Pepper, like Dart, was also devised and developed at Google in secret and was presented to the public after they had a mostly working system. And unlike a prototype which is used as a basis to start standardization discussion (including the option to make radical changes or discard the offer altogether) Google is already using Pepper in production systems so the opportunities for others to participate are rather narrow.
Edited 2012-02-23 08:17 UTC
Safari already supports NPAPI pepper extensions which is why Flash was able to use hardware acceleration frameworks such as Core Animation, Core Image etc. for their Apple plugin. The original Mozilla Pepper wiki entry listed all the contributions by Apple in terms of the pepper implementation hence the reason why Webkit plugin support was removed now that key features are now accessible to developers.
Don’t be surprised if Dart ends up in Safari soon – end of the day Firefox is a dead horse than needs to be taken out and turned into dog food. For over 10 years I’ve seen Firefox developers neglect the Mac platform so quite frankly long term dimise of Firefox doesn’t fill me with any grief. When arrogant programmers refuse to acknowledge that their product leaks memory like a sieve then again I have no sympathy for them. For me it seems as though Mozilla programmers and their supporters are butt hurt because they’ve been left out of the party – and sorry, I have no sympathy for them either.
Since version 10.1 Flash uses CoreAnimation and a bunch of other OS X frameworks to implement part of its functionality like drawing. How does NPAPI (pepper or not) plays into it exactly? Citation for your claims please. Here’s an article from a Flash engineer and it doesn’t say anything about NPAPI (pepper or not): http://www.kaourantin.net/2010/02/core-animation.html
https://wiki.mozilla.org/index.php?title=NPAPI:Pepper&oldid=275848
Where exactly? This the last version before the page was blanked.
Actually, I would since Apple’s WebKit engineers flat out refused to accept the necessary changes to support Dart just a few weeks ago. Google wanted to make WebKit language-agnostic and allow multiple concurrent scripting engines (currently only JavaScript is supported and only one engine at a time). Part of the reason for the refusal was the added code complexity and therefore maintenance burden. Another part was that Dart is not a web standard and WebKit’s own mission statement says “[…] using standards-based technologies such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript and the DOM” and they want to avoid adding to the current fragmentation.
I’m not saying that Dart in WebKit might not happen at one later point if the decision of the engineers is overridden by higher management but currently the magic eight ball says “Unlikely”.
Windows Vista/7 users had to endure a very non-native looking interface until just recently (Firefox 4) so it’s not like OS X is the only one suffering from that, especially if you consider that most developers are apparently using Mac or Linux. It simply boils down to lack of manpower, especially since large parts of Firefox codebase is currently being rewritten.
Which is unfortunate and very short-sighted since Mozilla is the only organization which believably fights for an open web. Whatever organizational failures Mozilla displayed in the past (and there were far too many), at least they got their priorities straight.
I can’t really argue against this. Even if taking into account that most of the remaining leaks are caused by extensions, Mozilla was far too lenient for far too long towards misbehaving extensions despite using them as a unique selling point for Firefox. Classical case of wanting to keep their cake and eat it. At long last they are tightening their rules for extensions to be hosted by Mozilla and started developing tools to help developers with finding leaks.
Edited 2012-02-23 14:03 UTC
Forgot to add this: Mozilla added the necessary changes to NPAPI to support CoreAnimation in Flash in Firefox 4. [1] Again, no sign of Pepper. I’m seriously suspecting that you are confusing here different technical matters but I’ll gladly be taught otherwise.
[1] implement Core Animation NPAPI drawing model for Mac OS X, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=497225
Edited 2012-02-23 14:13 UTC
Opera doesn’t have a bad track record with it at all… also steadfastly pushing for open web. In this case, Opera even proposed HTML5 video tag (and in its more open variant)
But I guess it’s also typical for Opera to be forgotten ;p (also how they, say, open the web for hundreds of millions of so called “feature phones” …while Mozilla, in the past abortive mobile efforts, essentially said “we’ll wait for more powerful (and rare, in the big picture) smartphones”)
Excuse me? Really, WTF are you on?
Firefox is not only the best-performing major browser of all current versions, it also happens to be the browser that uses the least amount of memory.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/firefox-7-web-browser,3037-14.h…
This has been the case since Firefox 7
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/firefox-7-web-browser,3037-17.h…
Where have you been?
It must be very disappointing when the actual facts get in the way of a good rant, isn’t it?
PS: Apparently this has recently shifted, as shown in the latest browser Grand Prix 9
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/chrome-17-firefox-10-ubuntu,312…
Overall, Chrome has caught up again, and it currently beats Firefox on Linux but not on Windows, so that there are two champions now:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/chrome-17-firefox-10-ubuntu,312…
Edited 2012-02-23 22:31 UTC
Nobody cares how much memory their browser uses anymore or page load benchmarks, When most machines from the shop have more than 3GB. These are simply mental masturbation material for each browser’s fanbois.
FireFox is increasingly buggy. Especially if you are using Firebug, it also still has the infamous Memory Leak and I am running FireFox 10.
Not that either of these bother me that much, what really knarks me about FireFox is that it can’t even fetch a page reliably these days and has lost it place as my development browser to Chrome (unfortunately though their JavaScript inspector is better).
My Development issues with it aside … there isn’t a huge amount of difference between the browsers any more to make it worth being evangelical about. The only good reason to choose a browser is because of the features that it has.
You can brag about benchmarks all you like, but when there is a dual core processor in most people’s machines these days page load times are going to be in milliseconds.
Load times is more about latency these days than bandwidth or browser speed, and I seen better performance improvements by just moving script tags to the bottom of the page than any other technique (including using a “faster” browser).
Browser benchmarks are pretty much mental masturbation for fanbois.
Edited 2012-02-26 19:32 UTC
No surprise for me, such thing happens when you depend on a propietary technology.
I would be a surprise if adobe would had developed a reasonable flash port for Linux 32 and 64 bits, which a lot of times has sucked all cycles to the bone from my CPU(s), and i was forced to kill the browes, no matter which was using flash plug in. And performance “issues” too. It is a “cowardice” to compare windows and Linux flash performance. Mac os i do not know, i do not use it.
It would be nice to have a “flashless” web, just using open standards. Open standards work for all.
It depends how well defined they are. Just ask C developers, Web developers or Posix programmers. The undefined parts of the standard make the code not always behave the same way.
No stardard is perfect, e.g. posix has some open dark corners. With C, if you use a C99 compliant compiler you rarely have a problem. Of course if you develop for windows and want to port to Linux, *BSDs (or vice-versa), you have a nightmare ahead.
As far as i know microsoft’s C compiler doe not support C99.I say again, open standards is the best option. Look at IPv4, HTML, JTAG, Ethernet and so on. Imagine the world we leave today wihtouy these standards…
None of the commonly used compilers are C99 compliant. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C99. GCC which is widely used has only implemented 43 features, 6 are missing, 1 is broken and 12 suffer from “library issues”. 12 years after the C99 standard is ratified, the fact that the majority of compilers do not support the standard shows how irrelevant that standard is to the real world. In fact, given the broken support of C99 among the popular compilers (i.e. GCC, Visual C++, Intel C++, Clang) you’d have to be stupid to use C99 features if portability is your goal.
Having said that, the biggest hurdles to portability have little to do with language standard compliance unless that code is written by some diva developer who wants to show how uber-1337 they are. Having ported code to across operating systems and architectures, the biggest issues to be aware off were bitness and endianess issues, and subtle difference in API routines. One that bit me before is how the POSIX function fsync() has different semantics on different supposedly “POSIX compliant” platforms. http://rhaas.blogspot.com/2010/10/wal-reliability.html
Standards are only valuable if they’re adhered to.
There are many language features like how overflow behaves, numeric type size, and a few other things that are not specified in the C standard. It is quite funny to see how even “expert” C developers fall in those traps.
http://blog.llvm.org/2011/05/what-every-c-programmer-should-know.ht…
http://blog.llvm.org/2011/05/what-every-c-programmer-should-know_14…
http://blog.llvm.org/2011/05/what-every-c-programmer-should-know_21…
And yet that standard DOES bring a bunch of useful stuff, such as Unicode support and standard integer types that do not suck.
I really don’t understand how people managed to write low-level code that is relatively compiler-agnostic before stdint.h.
With lots of preprocessor magic and typedefs.
The discontinuation of Flash on Android leaves streaming there in a rather sorry state. Prior to version 3, Android only supported Flash streaming and even though version 3.0 finally brought a shimmer of light in the form of HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) support, Google messed up the implementation so badly (including on ICS) that it’s hard to see Android tablets and phones taking off for standards-based video streaming any time soon. MPEG DASH is but a pipe dream and Microsoft’s SmoothStreaming and Adobe HTTP Dynamic Streaming each require absurdly complex muxing just to get it going… One thing Apple did right: streaming video on iOS Just Works(tm) right out of the box.
Except that you have corporate websites that a) require Flash and b) block all browsers other than IE and Firefox. So depending on where you work, Linux might simply stop being an option.
I didn’t realize that a currently working setup with firefox and flash on linux was going to magically stop working the day adobe decided to stop supporting standalone flash on linux.
we are sorry but this website requares flash plugin version 12
If as the article said, this is part of adobe’s plan for moving away from flash, why would they continue adding features to a dying platform?
so why are they going to update flash plugin for windows and mac os x then ?
I’m not the biggest fan of Flash, but there are other implementations of Flash on Linux other than Adobe’s. For those that still want to use it, what about projects like Gnash?
What will exactly work, I mean, STABLE… besides Flash itself? Nothing, in my experience…
almost dead and doesn’t work with new flash content
Thom got it right this time — it’s a race to see who doesn’t care first. Looks like it’s a mutli-way tie!
boo
Seriously. This piece of software needs to say good-bye to the web, once for all. It’s a disease and people have the choice to erradicate it.
Flash may not be it, but plugins are, for the simple reason that it´s not possible to do everything in javascript or html5. Even if it was, there is way too much code already written in C++. For this reason a proper, sandboxed plugin API such as PPAPI is much better than the horrible, outdated netscape API.
All the more reason to move to WebM HTML5 video.
Because all flash consists of is movies, let’s ignore all the random flash games that exist (some being quite fun time wasters) that will obviously be suddenly ported to HTML.
Spot on. Flash isn’t just a video player. It does a lot of things and it does them well, given the problem it has to solve. I have a friend who works at a web start-up company and the main product is Flash-based. It has to be, because nothing else is as flexible or powerful or fast enough as Flash is. I mention HTML5 and he laughs without hesitation. Maybe one day, years and years from now, HTML5 will be able to replace other forms of dynamic content on the web.
I think the reason people on here are so anti-Flash is because it traditionally hasn’t run well on Linux, so therefore it must be bad.
Flash sucks.
Flash hasn’t run very well anywhere, period. It’s a walled garden piece of crap. I’ll be glad it is gone. The only thing worse than that is Silverlight.
Great argument you got there. Works fine for me. Works fine for a lot of other people too. It has a lot of features that you can’t find except in Java applets, and those I think we can all agree we can do without.
Wrong, Flash is an incredibly slow and is schizophrenically unstable no mater it’s use and no matter the host OS or browser.
The only place that still makes Flash games is Newgrounds, which are still slow and usually pretty terrible. Most site features these days are now done in javascript so that they will work on iOS and Android based phones.
If I’m forced to use flash for any reason I can use Lightspark or Gnash, for video Youtube’s HTML5 beta provides plenty of videos in WebM format, for everything else there are plenty of video downloaders like Ant video that have no trouble pulling the .flv video in even without flash installed.
So no, Flash isn’t a requirement and there is precious little content made in Flash thats even worth porting. The kids on newgrounds can go and learn to use WebGL, theres plenty of resources that will teach them how to make a game that will run on everything.
It’s not slow for me. Sorry you’ve had such a bad experience.
You seem to be the only person on this site that seems apologetic for Flash, but my terrible experience with flash extends to Windows and Macs for more then a decade on Internet Explorer, Netscape, Mozilla, Camino, Firefox, iCab, Konqueror and Opera. I’ve yet to have a good experience with it. I hate that Youtube decided to use Flash as a video host else flash would have died 5 years ago, now that Google has WebM and H.264 video and many phones and tablets don’t have Flash these days it’s days are finally numbered.
So what’s so special about you that you have no trouble with this once again useless piece of shit?
I work in a office with 100 people that are constantly using flash. It is one of the few pieces of software that does work reliably.
Edited 2012-02-24 19:55 UTC
Maybe he doesn’t scapegoat all the ills (up to, say, pebkac) he was unable to troubleshoot (if any) onto flash?
And then, you mention schizoid motifs…
While desktop browser implementations of HMTL5 video actually tend to manage being bigger hogs that Flash (well, Windows one), often a difference between non- and usability, on slower machines.
And then, there’s embedded Flash behind things like Leapster (a small handheld console); also probably in more mobiles than all smartphones combined, and offering the smoothest experience out of available ~runtimes on such.
To be fair, over time it seemed more and more like some of those were a bit wrong problems to define & try to solve. In the meantime even eclipsing things that Flash was originally meant for, and really decent at.
Like some “legacy” stuff, from a decade & up ago – when Flash meant vector animations or games (typically running on P2-era Celerons). I guess not a long time from now only some selection will be around as ridiculously over-sized (MiB-wise) video files, offering worse quality than the originals. I wonder how much of this, well, cultural legacy has already been essentially lost; or maybe that’s just the way of things (or, OTOH, maybe they are in Archive.org and one day there will a suitable Flash->HTML5+ converter of sorts, or maybe ~virtualisation solution; and a way to actually discover & categorise stuff in Archive.org)
Then of course some crusaders, also seen nearby & scapegoating on Flash all problems of their systems, would just dismiss such as rubbish…
While, curiously, present desktop browser implementations of HTML5 video actually tend to be bigger hogs than Flash (at least the Windows one), less bearable on slow machines (like oldish netbooks); on such it’s still better to just intercept browser video streams by mplayer and such.
I see a future where instead of plugins many website’s will rely on App stores using platform specific API’s. This is kind of true for Netflix. The same will be true for all Flash dependent sites soon. That’ll of course create a even bigger barrier to entry for new platforms.
Maybe?
IIRC Mozilla has already declined. Why should we continue the disease?
Mozilla isn’t the only one who could port it, it could be implemented as an add-in. I use Debian and Xubuntu at home, and really, it isn’t time to dump flash yet, though some day, hopefully.
What are you actually using it for? WebM youtube works fine, for everything else theres video downloaders that work without Flash installed.
If it’s games then tell the game dev you won’t be paying for any game made in Flash due to the inherent security risks involved with having Flash installed.
Pay for what now? But really, thanks for telling me what to do, I have no way of deciding things for myself, so I’m glad you’re here.
Games like Samorost and Machinarium are paid Flash games, there are others but these may be the best known as they where in the Humble Indie Bundle, why they where done in Flash is something I will never understand.
perhaps because the barrier to entry is pretty low, and consistent on OS X and Windows, unlike HTML5, which is not yet consistent between browsers, or platforms.
And that makes a good reason to use it even though it omits a large percentage of your potential market share in the mobile space? That there isn’t something inherently wrong with asking your users to install a 3rd party library that is full of security holes and hogs obscene amounts of CPU time to do even the most basic things?
Doing things in Flash is just lazy and dirty. Mostly dirty.
I don’t do anything in flash, but on the other hand, Zynga does, and is currently the most profitable game developer in the world. Doesn’t seem to hurt them any.
I’m all for the idea of open web standards and high quality Linux multimedia. But the problem is that most content providers aren’t. With all of the limitations and hassles and constant flux that is HTML5 audio/video and DRM, to say nothing of the difficulty of coding complex web apps with AJAX/Javascript/HTML5 and all the other buzzwords, I honestly don’t see most major sites moving away from Flash for a long time to come. Which will once again leave Linux users with a limited, inferior experience.
If Adobe is trying to move away from Flash, why did they start by killing it off on the platform that has the lowest market share? Kill off the Windows version of Flash and then watch a massive shift away from Flash. It sounds to me like they still make plenty of money somehow with Flash on Windows and Mac, and not on Linux, so they are simply not interested in supporting a poor revenue generator. Meanwhile, if there is a dollar to be made with Flash on other platforms, I highly doubt they will ever discontinue it.
After Real Player, now Flash. What next?
Well, Real player is still alive elsewhere, to my surprise. I don’t know who would use it in their sane mind, but if this is any indication of future linux treatment, it will be a very uphill battle for cross platform media…..
That is something very similar to what I had in mind (but I didn’t say). What future for Linux? Is this yet another sign that Linux is going downhill?
No. It’s the sign that Flash is dead as a platform. Flash has no future.
My Android phone (LG Optimus V) does not support Flash, and I was surprised that not only does YouTube run on it, so do the videos from a porn site. So if porn sites are ditching Flash for cell phones, then a Flash-free experience must be making progress. The thing is, even with Flash not installed and NoScript not blocking them, these sites still claim that they require Flash. So apparently they’re sniffing the user agent, and going by that to determine Flash compatibility, and forcing it on desktop Linux because, hey–it’s available.
I think I heard something about YouTube starting some HTML5 video testing a while back–how has that been going? Is it anywhere near stable yet? I’m just getting sick of being stuck with Flash for Web video on my primary computing platform–the desktop–when so many sites seem to at least providing the option for mobile platforms like Android.
http://www.youtube.com/html5
you can opt-in and try it out yourself
it started out not very good, but it’s gotten better over time. see also: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2011/11/youtubes-html5-player-gets…
Cool, thanks for the link. I’ll see how it is.
I have the HTML5 trial on (for Firefox) all the time. Unless you check by right-clicking on a playing video, it is difficult to tell if it is a HTML5/WebM video or a Flash/h264 video. They perform the same. If you have joined the HTML5 trial, then the majority of YouTube videos, especially newer ones, are delivered in HTML5/WebM.
UZ64:
The article linked says: “I’ve also noticed that sometimes embedded videos use the HTML5 player even if you’ve already installed Flash and you haven’t enabled the HTML5 trial.”
Apparently, some YouTube videos are delivered now via HTML5/WebM even if you have Flash installed and you have not joined the HTML5 trial. If you are a YouTube user with Chrome, Firefox or Opera, you have probably already viewed a number of videos delivered via HTML5/WebM without realising it.
Edited 2012-02-23 11:02 UTC
You don’t need to opt-in anymore. It’s enabled by default.
YouTube’s HTML5 player works great and it has been enabled by default for a few months now. Somewhere around 90% of the videos are available via the HTML5 player.
In addition to joining the HTMLK5 beta you should install marinos35’s WebM search plugin for youtube http://mycroft.mozdev.org/search-engines.html?name=Youtube+WebM
Yep, Been flash free for a long time now, Flash was the cause of 99% of crashes I’ve had on Linux.
I fully expect to see Google start killing off Flash and H.264 in the next few years. The WebM video even plays well on a 2Ghz Pentium4.
Probably because they terrified themselves by the realization how it’s easier to save those videos on a PC (like they would really stop anybody…)
But HTML5 video has its dark side …somehow, its implementation in desktop browser manages to be less optimised than Flash (at least the Windows one); often to the point of frustration on ~netbook class machines.
… making my system extremely slow and being unable to display fullscreen videos at an acceptable framerate. This was true with my 2005 setup ; it is still true today with my much upgraded PC.
Years of waiting for a 64 bits version. It eventually arrived but it took a hell of a time and sometimes seems to be even slower (?).
Years of waiting for proper hardware acceleration — which temporarily arrived through VDPAU and vanished a few months later giving me false hope
Should I be relieved, or will it get even worse ? At least, we were compatible but slow as hell.
Oh gees, overall, to flash devs : thanks for ruining my computing experience in the last 7 years and probably in the years to come 🙂 Really, I cannot think of anything even remotely as terrible as this… (as far as computers are concerned 🙂
I know what you will say : Flash is not essential. Sadly it is. My wife has to be able to do everything she wants with my Linux box and tons of web developers still love Flash. Now, I have to make a choice : keep an outdated and crappy plugin in the 5 next years or switch to Chrome, which I do not want even if it’s a fine piece of software.
Edited 2012-02-23 08:51 UTC
The problem is probably the sorry state of the Linux desktop and its API and drivers, making it hard for anyone other than the OSS goons to produce working, performant and compatible software for the platform. That said, Flash worked fine for me for most of the past 7 years that I’ve used it on Linux.
I’ve never heard the phrase “OSS goons” before. What exactly are they? Are they criminal groups who coerce software company executives into open sourcing their company’s products using threats of violence?
More like a mob than a criminal enterprise.
Yeah, we leave the organized crime racket to Redmond.
** My name is soulbender and I am a major freetard **
… sums you up very nicely.
I tell you what mate, go to Italy where they have proper crime rackets like the Camorra and see what real Damage that is actually doing … Maybe you won’t make such fucking retarded comments.
What, lost your sense of humor? Didn’t have one to begin with?
I guess it’s a blessing for OSNews that we have you around to make high quality comments like comparing the OSS folks to a mob.
Also, using “freetard” is a sure-fire sign of a well-thought out comment.
Edited 2012-02-26 03:57 UTC
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoclaTQWzvc
My opinion of your comments which are “jokes” is very similar to Mr Hitchen’s opinion on “George Bush Jokes”.
The free software crowd do act like a mob, Every tech news site is littered with “Linux is wicked” … It is much like waiting for the Zerg Rush when playing Starcraft.
I Reckon I could write a perl script to post certain members comments on here and nobody would notice the difference.
You comments on the recent Visual Studio thread are testament to this and are less than helpful, same with _txf..
You act sound like a freetard, you act like a freetard … does that make you one … in my mind yes.
If you don’t like the label, I suggest you act differently.
Edited 2012-02-26 12:26 UTC
Don’t feel bad just because the joke hit so close to home for you.
It’s nice to know that you think you are objectively right and everyone else is objectively wrong (or “freetard”, as you so eloquently call them).
Really? Because I asked an serious question if VS still used the horrible SourceSafe? It was horrible back when I still did VS development so I was curious.
Or becuase I said I liked the new UI?
Nah, I really don’t care what you “wintards” think of me.
You made the dumb “Microsoft” Joke not I. I don’t find the Microsoft Jokes particularly funny, because they have been done by pretty much every Linux fanboi since forever.
Well I think most of the uproar is more about people not wanting to pay for stuff. They use Linux thinking they have “beat the man” and then perform a Zerg Rush on every news site that claims Linux isn’t anything other than Stellar.
A couple of years ago, you yourself didn’t think those who made music deserved to get paid (I will find the comments if need be).
The Term freetard has been about … I will call you one since
SourceSafe wasn’t that bad, it worked for small teams and was pretty cheap. Worked well with about 4 developers.
But I don’t think you’ve ever used it.
So why are you acting soo butthurt if you don’t care?
Anyway I actually buy OpenBSD releases, donated to several open projects … And I even gave the Adblock guy £25. I run a Fedora Machine, own a SGI O2, have an Android Phone and Have a Popcorn hour Media box (runs Linux) … I can hardly be called a Wintard.
<Yawn> Because Google can’t control Linux users they decide to force them to do what? Lolz. Bye Bye Adobe, Bye Bye Google. They may think they rule the web, but guess what? Nope.
BTW, if you really must have the thing, just hack it and make our own along with the half dozen or so other versions we lucky Linux users have.
Say what? Hack it? What thing? The groove thang?
wtf?
Quite frankly, I don’t think that Flash will die a quick death. It will remain among us like the walking corpse that is IE6.
Also, is there any major content distributor who intends to use HTML5 for stuff that really counts? I’m talking about commercial streaming services like Netflix & Co., not “free” sites like YouTube.
Great times as a Linux user. No Flash, no Silverlight, no options.
Seems like I can partially answer my own question. There’s this proposal at W3C, concerning additions to HTML5 that would allow DRM:
http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/html-media/raw-file/tip/encrypted-media/encry…
This probably won’t fly
http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/02/unethical-html-video-c…
Not “is” – by now, it’s really “was”: http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-monthly-200807-201202
What people tend to over-look is this plan takes place five years from now. That gives plenty of time for Gnash to catch up, it gives sites time to move to HTML5 and it gives other browsers (like Firefox and Opera) time to adopt Pepper.
Why would they want to do that? The goal is to eventually ween the world off closed formats. IIRC Mozilla has already declined.
Yes indeed I dont think here we have other issue then the simple fact that adobe are complete idiots.
THey have a platform that runs on 99% of the PCs and a big junk of Android and other smartphones and what they do ?they stoping android version they are now stoping linux version they are killing there own bussines TOTAL idiots indeed. Ok they dont want to push more money in Flash plugin since HTML5 is good well good but why they stop flash plugins from android linux and etc ? CUZ they are what ??? I told that already IDIOTS.
Thats why we should not use software of some strange shitty companies like Adobe or Microsoft or … well companies that stops products, products that we like and use and even make money on top of them.
In your “wisdom” you don’t seem to realize that Adobe doesn’t get money from flash players – they get it from production and distribution tools …they might very well continue being strong in those, if only thanks to momentum
(and, now, possibly also tricking the people who care about such stuff into admiring Adobe, for embracing & pushing HTML5)
http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Gnash-0-8-10-GNU-Flash-playe…
It is by no means a complete solution, but it is still being actively developed, and it does now include a renderer for OpenVG, an API for hardware-accelerated 2D vector and raster graphics.
So what? Perhaps Gnash will have caught up with Flash when the latter is officially dead five years from now. Personally I have never understood the appeal of such projects. On the one hand Flash is “evil”, and everyone wants it to die. On the other hand resources are invested into something like Gnash, which is a half-baked solution for nothing.
If you want a Flash capability on your Linux machine, which happens not to be x86, you are not dependent on the whims of Adobe.
If you don’t want Flash on your machine, you don’t install it.
Either way, you get to do what you want on your machine.