Still waiting for Flash

Things have improved somewhat on that front; we now have a few top-quality web browsers to choose between. At the same time, though, one might be forgiven for thinking that we are heading back into a similar situation, but involving Flash this time around. For all practical purposes, there is only one viable option for Flash on Linux: the binary-only plugin provided by Adobe. But that plugin is not just proprietary software; it also is somewhat old and buggy, and there is nothing we can do to fix it. For an increasing part of the web experience, we still have a second-rate, proprietary platform.

When one thinks of Flash, naturally, one thinks of video sites like YouTube. But there is more to the Flash experience than silly videos and obnoxious advertising. Some parts of Google are heavily into flash, as can be seen from that company's finance sites or analytics offerings. Your editor's children will attest that there's no end of game sites which require Flash, and for which the Linux plugin fails to work properly. Looking for any way to reduce the total amount of time spent in airplane seats, your editor recently investigated "around the world" tickets; that search ended up at this travel planning site which, of course, requires Flash. And so on. Like it or not, Flash is the language in which an increasing number of interactive sites are being coded, and Linux does not have proper support for it.

With this in mind, your editor decided to give the recently-announced Gnash 0.8.2 release a try. This release was billed as the first beta version of Gnash, so there was reason to hope that it would be something close to a true solution to the Flash problem. In reality, Gnash is a step in the right direction, but the Flash issue will be with us for some time yet.

For now, the acid test for a Flash player would appear to be YouTube, so that is the first place your editor went. The experience there was mixed. It is, in fact, possible to watch YouTube videos using the Gnash Firefox plugin. Hearing them is another matter, though; they all played silently. It would not be surprising to learn that getting audio is a matter of filling in a missing codec - but would sure be nice if the software were to say something to that effect. Pausing and playing the video worked, but skipping around in it did not. Playing videos from other sites was uniformly unsuccessful.

The "around the world" calculator appeared to load properly, but then took off as if somebody were punching all of its buttons at once. Charts on Google sites are uniformly blank. Some flash games mostly worked, others showed more input-related confusion. Few of them were truly playable. On the other hand, Flash "intros" and advertisements mostly work as intended - just what your editor wanted.

So Gnash is not really there yet. In truth, this software is not in a condition where the use of the term "beta" makes sense; there is a lot of work yet to be done. There are few of us clamoring for support for more obnoxious advertising - especially among the LWN readership, as your plentiful emails over the last couple of months have made clear. What we want is working support for the useful Flash applications out there - and there are a few of those at this point. Gnash does not, currently, provide that support. (Your editor also tried out Swfdec 0.6.0, with generally worse results).

That said, it is clear that a lot of work has been done to get Gnash to this point. Your editor has no real way to judge how much more is required to get full support for even Flash version 7; chances are it is not a small job. Needless to say, support for newer versions of Flash will require even more work. But there now appears to be a solid platform upon which that work can be done, and that is an important start. Gnash has the look of a project which has overcome some of the biggest initial hurdles and is now setting a pace to finish the job. With luck, it will have reached the point where the fact that it almost works will inspire new developers to come in and fill in the remaining pieces.

Adobe has the ability to make this job a lot easier. Your editor has heard, informally, that the company has taken a less hostile position toward the Gnash developers than it had in the past, but it certainly is still not helping them. The Flash specifications are not available to anybody trying to create a Flash player, and, unsurprisingly, the Flash EULA forbids any sort of reverse engineering. That EULA, incidentally, also forbids running Adobe's player on any "non-PC device," including tablets and phones. That restriction suggests that Adobe sees business opportunities in the lack of a free Flash player for such systems and intends to ensure that this scarcity continues. So, despite the occasionally friendly noises Adobe has been making toward the Linux community, we should not expect a great deal of help from that direction.

Someday, people will figure out that closed standards (like Flash) are best avoided. Meanwhile, Flash is a fact of life that we will need to deal with. It appears that we are getting closer to being able to deal with it - but we are not there yet.