Flash Player 9 Beta for Linux is available (ZDNet)

Posted Oct 19, 2006 17:28 UTC (Thu) by hawk (subscriber, #3195) [Link]

Yes, I saw that too... It was just awkward to read.

They seem to have made some significant improvements over the old flash plugins behaviour, though...

Posted Oct 19, 2006 18:48 UTC (Thu) by cventers (subscriber, #31465) [Link]

I mostly agree with you, but I should point out that Adobe is a Trolltech
customer, so in so far as they need GUI elements, they should just be
using Qt.

Posted Oct 20, 2006 0:14 UTC (Fri) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

There's a lot of confusion here, for example you'd be wrong to imagine that Adobe need to invent a plugin system, the Netscape plugin API, which is pretty similar on all its platforms hasn't changed much for years. They can spend as much time as they like on COM and ActiveX but that only gets them an IE plugin, the other browsers (whether on Windows, Mac OS, or Linux) use the Netscape API or their own derivative of it. Only Internet Explorer on Windows supports ActiveX objects running in the browser, and it's cost them very dearly because, put simply, it's a security disaster. It's not that ActiveX is "more" than IPC, it's hardly any IPC at all, it's almost all in-process.

The "native Windows controls" are a joke. When you try to list applications that use them you just end up with a list of exceptions. Internet Explorer? Nope, re-implemented due to infelicities in scrolling real windows. Excel maybe? Nope. Office re-implements almost all the controls. Skype? No. Media Player? No again. Windows ships with only three trivial card games, and each of them has its own widgets and its own UI behaviour. Ah, Notepad uses a common control, it has a normal, Win32 text widget. Of course, that's the source of most of the bugs in Notepad, so maybe not a good example. Adobe don't use the regular native Windows controls, but you've never noticed because no-one else does either, the "one set of controls in Windows vs many different toolkits in Linux" is a myth.

Most of the APIs you referred to are provided for the browser plugin by its host, and I'm not at all sure I even /want/ them in the non-plugin version that is apparently mostly a debugging aid anyway, Adobe already shipped a PDF reader that tries to phone home even when you tell it not to, who needs a standalone flash player that's always going onto the Internet to download HTML pages?

A lot of development work was on stuff Free Software people had to do as well, e.g. ALSA, except that Free Software got this stuff done years ago and Adobe are like their proprietary colleagues only just catching up. And from the sounds of the blog that was linked, they're struggling to catch up to the modern world (e.g Core Audio) on OS X as well. They still have code that's not 64-bit clean, about a decade after even /Microsoft/ started warning people this would be necessary.

Posted Oct 20, 2006 5:58 UTC (Fri) by oak (guest, #2786) [Link]

> The rendering libraries are totally different. Windows has had GDI+
> for years. UNIX is only now just finally getting its hands on something
> equivalent in the form of Cairo or Arthur. Obviously the Windows
> codebase, which has been around for some time, isn't using Cairo, but
> GDI+ doesn't exist for Linux, so that whole layer has to be rewritten.

Which Flash versions are using/require GDI+?

What actually are the operations that GDK+ (and now Cairo) offer that
e.g. Gdk doesn't offer:
- Bezier curves & paths[1] (I don't see what's the problem in doing these
inside Flash player, I would anyway thought it to *want* to have its
own implementation of these)
- Device independence (I've never seen any need to print any of
the Flash advertisements[2], have you? ;-))
- Anything else?

[1] Gnome apps use libart for these, see:
http://developer.gnome.org/doc/books/WGA/graphics-libart....

[2] There are some quite nice flash usages like converting CAD-drawings
or maps to Flash objects which you can view & zoom with browser and
with which printing might be nice. However, I've never used those.

Posted Oct 26, 2006 4:20 UTC (Thu) by pynm0001 (guest, #18379) [Link]

> The GUI toolkits on each platform are totally separate.

Not really an issue. Flash needs approximately enough of the GUI to draw
images which it generates completely on its own and use mouse events.
The plugin doesn't even use any common controls, it reimplements those.

> UNIX is only now just finally getting its hands on something equivalent
in the form of Cairo or Arthur.

First of all that's incorrect (Qt 3 and libart + GDK are in the same
league as GDI+), second of all as I mentioned earlier, the rendering
needs for the plugin are not really that sophisticated. You don't think
Macromedia (and now Adobe) leaves their vector algorithms to the tender
graces of the operating system's rendering layer, do you? No, it's all
done within the plugin, and then bit-blitted out to a rectangle.

Only major issue I can see is that it would be hard to accelerate video
stream decoding in a cross-platform fashion.

> Windows plugin systems get to use COM and ActiveX.

It's already been mentioned, but this has absolutely no bearing to the
discussion, since Windows Firefox's plugin doesn't use ActiveX. (BTW,
ActiveX is just another name for COM)

> Windows has a standard HTML component.

If you're really going to try and convince me that the Flash player tries
to render any kind of non-trivial HTML I'm going to start laughing so
hard. Again, this is also a problem on Windows if it's a problem on
Linux, as Firefox's HTML widget is not the Windows standard one.

> Windows has standard libraries for high-level networking, like fetching
files over HTTP.

Have you ever written networking code? I don't know what the
conventional wisdom is about HTTP but it's really quite a simple
protocol, one that I'm sure the pros at Adobe would have no trouble with.

> Cross platform development, especially when you're talking about a GUI,
is very difficult.

*cough Qt cough*

Seriously though, although I'm not sure how useful Qt would be for a
cross-platform plugin for Flash since it provides no audio or video
interface to speak of, it's not as hard to write cross platform code as
you make it sound.

And instead of using wrapper functions to hack in cross-platform code, we
tend to use some form of wrapper classes instead, in conjunction with a
sane design. I hear the Java guys call them interfaces. ;)

This isn't to take away from the work the Adobe guys are doing. It's not
easy becoming familiar enough with the GNU/Linux toolchain to be able to
quickly turn Flash into something which takes advantage of all that Linux
can do and still do so in a way that works in both Firefox and Konqueror.

Posted Oct 22, 2006 19:07 UTC (Sun) by salimma (subscriber, #34460) [Link]

They're not alone. Real is also having the same problem in making their code 64-bit-clean.