Flash players for Linux [LWN.net]

Flash players for Linux

Posted Jan 12, 2006 14:08 UTC (Thu) by bk (guest, #25617)
In reply to: Flash players for Linux by PhilHannent
Parent article: Flash players for Linux

As this excellent blog entry argues, the base technologies don't matter so much provided they get the job more or less done (in that respect SVG/ECMAScript is just as good as SWF).

The key is a powerful, slick and easy to use creation tool. Flash has such popularity because Macromedia's creation suite is so good, not because SWF is an inherently better format. If our community came up with a compelling, comprehensive SVG/$scripting_language creation package we might see some real competition forming, rather than constantly playing catch-up to proprietary formats.

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Flash players for Linux

Posted Jan 19, 2006 18:38 UTC (Thu) by obi (subscriber, #5784) [Link]

I think you haven't really worked with Flash then. I not only hate their IDE, I abhor it. It's heavy, buggy, unreliable and bloated. Anything could make it crash, and make you lose work (in some cases, the files even disappear when it crashes). The widgets/toolkit are completely out of place and don't work with the OS facilities (mousewheel, two screens, look and feel, behaviour, etc) and the FLA source files are non-portable even between supported platforms (even though files made on Windows open on the mac, there's no guarantee you'll end up with the same file).

Yes, it's that bad.

The swf player/plugin on the other hand does pretty much everything as advertised, for the simple reason that swf (contrary to .fla's for instance) are well-defined. I have little problems with the flash player platform, except that it's not available under a very liberal license. MIT or LGPL would be nice - for communicating with/embedding in other apps for instance; but even GPL would be very helpful already - it would make swf work on my Linux/PPC machines.

I'd really like decent SVG to be ubiquitous (and almost pixel-perfect across different renderers), but it's just not going to happen any time soon. Flash is currently the next best thing.