Weekly Edition
Return to the Announcements pageSponsored link
Serve your customers, not your servers, with VERIO Linux VPS. Full-access test-drive here.
| Weekly edition | Kernel | Security | Distributions | Search |
| Archives | Calendar | Subscribe | Write for LWN | LWN.net FAQ |
Adobe releases Flash Player 10 beta
(Log in to post comments)
32-bit only
Posted May 15, 2008 23:09 UTC (Thu) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link]
They still don't get it or their code is really, really messy and cannot be recompiled for other architectures.
32-bit only
Posted May 15, 2008 23:33 UTC (Thu) by ilmari (subscriber, #14175) [Link]
The ActionScript (the ECMAScript dialect used in Flash) VM uses JIT compilation, so it's not just a matter of recompiling, but retargeting the JIT compiler backend to a new architecture.
BTW, Adobe released the VM, Tamarin, as free software, and it's being integrated into SpiderMonkey and hence all Mozilla-based products.
32-bit only
Posted May 16, 2008 10:27 UTC (Fri) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link]
Wonderful. All we need is yet another fscking VM. Even so, the JIT engine should have been "deintregated" so as to have the main executable (read: browser plugin and standalone player) as 64-bit, resulting in much less 32-bit dependencies in my packaging system. But then again... the Adobe Flash implementation is so fscking slow (no Xv acceleration, no optimized video decoding˛) it probably does not matter anyhow. ˛Given that MPlayer can do it (youtube videos) with about 15% CPU of the Athlon XP/Thoroughbred, I really start to wonder why Flash needs more than 4-fold of that, maxing out the CPU.
32-bit only
Posted May 17, 2008 12:33 UTC (Sat) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]
Because it needs to render RGB data on top of the video, which can't be done sanely if you're using a YUV overlay. Not to mention the fact that most hardware only lets you use one overlay at once.
32-bit only
Posted May 17, 2008 13:32 UTC (Sat) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link]
>Because it needs to render RGB data on top of the video, which can't be done sanely if you're using a YUV overlay. It can be done. schismtracker, which only uses RGB, converts this to YUV2 using SDL, and I can live with that. Throwing in a video should be a no brainer. >Not to mention the fact that most hardware only lets you use one overlay at once. I am aware of that limitation. On dedicated embedded appliances, we know there is only one Flash drawing window open at any time, so it would be a big win. As for the home user, Adobe could simply start out with X11 output for all video windows and add an option to the right-click menu to enable Xv on a specific window so that at least the main window of Youtube where many-fps video actually plays can be accelerated.
Avoid Flash 10 Beta for Linux - it crashes FIrefox
Posted May 15, 2008 23:23 UTC (Thu) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link]
Avoid Flash 10 Beta for Linux like The Plague. I downloaded and installed it on my Slackware 12.0 system (32-bit x86) running Firefox 2.0.0.14. The first YouTube video I tried playing immediately caused the whole browser to crash without saying why. I've already posted a message stating my troubles to Adobe's message forum.
The latest release of Flash 9 works fine on the same computer.
Avoid Flash 10 Beta for Linux - it crashes FIrefox
Posted May 15, 2008 23:30 UTC (Thu) by dowdle (subscriber, #659) [Link]
News Flash... Flash 9 usually crashed my browser (either the Firefox 2 series or the 3 beta) several times a day.
That's old news
Posted May 16, 2008 1:28 UTC (Fri) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link]
When I said that Flash 9 works "fine", I was speaking in relative terms. Version 9 gives me grief every so often as well. But at least it didn't crash the very first time I tried using it.
I use a little shell script and symlink trickery to run Firefox with the flash plugin disabled by default, and enable it only when needed (i.e., to get my YouTube or Google Video "fix"). Accordingly, I have very few Flash crashes, not to mention Web browsing is generally less annoying without flash-based ads.
That's old news
Posted May 16, 2008 2:04 UTC (Fri) by mikachu (guest, #5333) [Link]
I can recommend flashblock http://flashblock.mozdev.org/, it replaces all flash movies with a button you can press to show them. I also agree that the new beta is very bad on linux, I didn't get through a single youtube video without crashing, however, the fullscreen mode was less choppy during the brief period it worked :).
That's old news
Posted May 16, 2008 13:13 UTC (Fri) by afalko (subscriber, #37028) [Link]
I just tried flashblock. I can't be happier :). I used to see heavy CPU usage when using flash, now its pretty much gone. I don't need multi core anymore :). Thanks for the tip.
That's old news
Posted May 16, 2008 16:58 UTC (Fri) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]
I can't imagine trying to use flash-based things without flashblock. There are far too many flash things that start immediately. So I'd click a link, switch tabs, read some email, write a bit of code, work on a puzzle a little, and come back to the first tab to find that I've missed the whole thing, whatever it was.
That's old news
Posted May 16, 2008 2:07 UTC (Fri) by Mithrandir (subscriber, #3031) [Link]
Perhaps you should try these Firefox extensions: NoScript: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/722 You can turn Java and JavaScript on and off with a single click, on the fly. FlashBlock: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/433 Each flash item in the page is replaced by a button you can click to allow that particular item to load and display. While you're at it, you could try another of my favourite extensions: Nuke Anything Enhanced: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/951 I particularly like the new feature: "remove everything else" which allows you to select the text on a page that you actually want to read, then right click and remove all the other annoying junk from the page.
That's old news
Posted May 22, 2008 16:05 UTC (Thu) by lysse (subscriber, #3190) [Link]
Nor did it me (also Slackware, 11.0 and 12.0). Unfortunately, it didn't take very long before Flash crashed every time a Flash ad arrived, and I've had cases of it preventing Firefox from even *starting up*. Therefore Flash of any kind is persona non grata on my systems.
Flash 9 not crashing
Posted May 16, 2008 4:22 UTC (Fri) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link]
Flash 9 usually crashed my browser (either the Firefox 2 series or the 3 beta) several times a day.I often see complaints like this on Linux forums, and wonder a bit because my own experience with it has not been like this at all. What am I doing wrong? :-) For me, Flash 9 crashes fairly rarely on the two Linux systems I mostly use, 32-bit Centos on a Dell and 64-bit Mandriva on an Asus Vintage barebone. Maybe it is the video chips & drivers? The Dell uses Intel video, the Asus has ATI 9250, the only common theme being they both use only open source video drivers.
Flash 9 not crashing
Posted May 16, 2008 4:43 UTC (Fri) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]
Flash 9 does seem to crash much more often on my work machine, which runs RHEL4 with an nVidia proprietary driver, than on my personal laptop, currently running Fedora 7 with the free radeon driver.
Flash 9 not crashing
Posted May 16, 2008 14:55 UTC (Fri) by tjc (subscriber, #137) [Link]
Flash 9 crashed Firefox the first time I used it, and a second time about ten minutes later, so I uninstalled it and left it alone. I was hoping version 10 would be better...
Avoid Flash 10 Beta for Linux - it crashes FIrefox
Posted May 16, 2008 12:36 UTC (Fri) by sbergman27 (subscriber, #10767) [Link]
strace and ltrace are your friends. :-)
Avoid Flash 10 Beta for Linux - it crashes FIrefox
Posted May 16, 2008 12:48 UTC (Fri) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link]
Try using nspluginwrapper, so at least flash crashes don't take down the whole browser. Bonus: 32-bit plugin on 64-bit browser (if your system has a multilib implementation).
Still no windowless mode
Posted May 16, 2008 6:29 UTC (Fri) by shalem (subscriber, #4062) [Link]
Unfortunately the Flash-10 plugin still does not support windowless mode, causing flash to still be on top of the dropdown menus many websites use. If anyone reading this has contacts @adobe, please tell them that firefox 3 now supports windowless mode plugins on Unix, and that they _really_ should support that in their plugin, as they do on windows.
Gnash
Posted May 16, 2008 6:46 UTC (Fri) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750) [Link]
In other news, Gnash 0.8.3 (soon to be released) seems to be able to play also some other video sites besides Youtube, including embedded Youtube which didn't work for me before. Also the usual improvements ie. more sites working otherwise, too. Not much on the Flash 9 side yet, though, probably starting after this release. Pre-release in eg. Debian experimental.
swfdec
Posted May 16, 2008 12:19 UTC (Fri) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link]
swfdec plays almost all video sites. Unfortunately, Flash 9 is not supported either.
Gnash
Posted May 16, 2008 13:22 UTC (Fri) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]
I installed the gnash plugin. Got into a flash-enabled site. Got a separate 100% CPU process that eats some 160MB of memory for each flash window. It is mostly good for displaying adds. and not much more. Thus in the mean time I have no flash player installed on my system.
Gnash
Posted May 16, 2008 15:30 UTC (Fri) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750) [Link]
I've seen that before, but the 0.8.3 pre-release I referred to has behaved relatively nicely so far, with the notable exception of Google Analytics. Anyway, I used to have no flash player, but have now had Gnash installed for a while. But indeed there has been a need to killall gtk-gnash on some sites, hopefully it's going to be soon over. It does display many company sites properly for me, probably because if there is any sense left in a company first of all producing home pages in Flash, they choose to stay at Flash 7 level for compatibility.
video for the web...
Posted May 16, 2008 10:59 UTC (Fri) by sylware (subscriber, #35259) [Link]
Flash is 99.9999% used as a video player. As soon as the W3C will have finished blocking the DOM minimal video player and the main video sites support this DOM player, flash is fried. Adobe knows that so they are trying hard to take over mozilla. You can witness it by the bloatification of spidermonkey from a light clean C lib to a monstruously complex C++ VM (yes the clean C code is trashed). I think the mozilla fondation members got corrupted because anybody with a bit of common sens in computer design would have seen that coming.
video for the web...
Posted May 16, 2008 12:02 UTC (Fri) by mtall (guest, #52045) [Link]
Off-topic: one can easily write bloated C code just much as in C++. Either way, this is not the place to start another C vs C++ "discussion", seeing how there was one recently regarding the "gold" linker.
video for the web...
Posted May 16, 2008 22:49 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
One starring... the same person on the anti-C++ side. Odd that.
video for the web...
Posted May 16, 2008 21:18 UTC (Fri) by nhippi (subscriber, #34640) [Link]
> You can witness it by the bloatification of spidermonkey from a light clean C lib to a monstruously complex C++ VM (yes the clean C code is trashed). Eh this is the first time I've heard someone describe the current macro hell of Mozilla JavaScript interpreter as "light clean C lib". thou the armchair architecht in me would have preferred a LLVM based Jit VM than yet-another-handcoded VM what tamarin is.. Perhaps the webkit people will do that then.
video for the web...
Posted May 16, 2008 22:50 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
You forgot the Sylware Maxim: if it's C, it is ipso facto light and clean and elegant, regardless of any properties of the actual code. If it's C++, it is similarly ugly and bloated, even if (as with much of the STL, say) its size hit is exactly as low as it would be with hand-crafted C code. This is religion. It doesn't need to have a grounding in mere plebeian *facts*.
video for the web...
Posted May 19, 2008 8:40 UTC (Mon) by sylware (subscriber, #35259) [Link]
*yawning* *yawning again*
And the good news...
Posted May 16, 2008 14:32 UTC (Fri) by jmspeex (subscriber, #51639) [Link]
Is that Flash now supports Speex. It'll be interesting to see what they'll be doing with it. At least it should help gnash and others in terms of codec support.
Java Will soon have Video Capabilities & The Plugin is Fixed Applets will live again.
Posted May 16, 2008 14:54 UTC (Fri) by kevdaly (guest, #52119) [Link]
Sun is committed to making the Java Plugin and JavaFX competitive with Flash. http://on2.com/index.php?id=439&news_id=622 And the new Java Plugin is fast & solves all of the problems with Java Applets. Suns code is much more cross platform friendly and reliable, so with JavaFX due in the fall we might see a real competitor for Flash from Java Applets. https://jdk6.dev.java.net/6u10ea.html
Java Will soon have Video Capabilities & The Plugin is Fixed Applets will live again.
Posted May 16, 2008 15:38 UTC (Fri) by Seegras (guest, #20463) [Link]
So where exactly is the working version for amd64 of that java-plugin? So much about "solves all problems".
Java Will soon have Video Capabilities & The Plugin is Fixed Applets will live again.
Posted May 16, 2008 17:03 UTC (Fri) by kevdaly (guest, #52119) [Link]
1. As the JDK is now open source, the community could provide such functionality if it was deemed important. OpenJDK has a plugin implementation for firefox, that could be ported if someone wants to do it. If adobe decides not support flash on 64bit, you're screwed. 2. The 32 bit plugin works fine using nspluginwrapper. As I can't think of any applets that would need to address more than 2 gigs of memory, there's really no advantage to running a 64 bit plugin.
Client-side Java
Posted May 16, 2008 21:26 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]
"Java plugin"? Are we back to the 90's? Oh God, please tell me that we don't have to search using those horrible meta-crawlers, again!Sorry to be sarcastic, but nobody needs or wants client-side Java anymore. Its time (if it ever had one) has passed. Not even Sun -- it was just a publicity stunt anyway. The last time I saw something interesting within the Java plugin was... never. Add to that the pitiful page integration that browser plugins have, and you have the worst of both worlds.
Client-side Java
Posted May 16, 2008 22:06 UTC (Fri) by zlynx (subscriber, #2285) [Link]
Sorry to say that you're wrong, but everyone wants client-side Java. Even if they don't call it that, it's what they're busy turning Javascript into. Soon it'll be JIT compiled instead of interpreted and it will speed up a lot. A few objects for screen drawing and I/O and ... oh wait, Firefox is already adding those.
Instead of all this bother with Javascript and AJAX it would have been a whole lot better to have built a browser with full DOM Java integration, a limited Java class library, and the ability to accept compiled or source-code Java from SCRIPT tags. Back in 1999.
Client-side Java
Posted May 16, 2008 22:41 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]
You are right, but that is not what Java was or is going to be. If Java had had a sane user interface (instead of Swing), some bytecode that was easy to optimize (instead of being stack-based), and good DOM libraries, it would be a great language, but it wouldn't be Java. (Incidentally, it would be close to Dalvik.)It is a testimony to Sun's technical blunders that Javascript, once the ugly sister, is now the star language for the web. While being ugly, I might add.
Client-side Java
Posted May 16, 2008 23:06 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
JS is actually a very pretty language with a few astoundingly ugly bad decisions in it (everything using globals is the biggest one, and the absence of an easy way to turn an object into a prototype for another: but the latter at least is easily fixed).It's just that the available docs are mostly utterly awful, so most people don't know how to use it properly. Doug Crockford's video tutorials (especially the advanced ones) are excellent, though.
Client-side Java
Posted May 16, 2008 23:08 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
I've seen *one* good use of client-side Java: the little applets on Greg Egan's home page, which are excellent interactive clarifiers of some of the more... difficult ideas in his SF stories.
Flash is a platform
Posted May 16, 2008 15:06 UTC (Fri) by creyes123 (subscriber, #49450) [Link]
I've developed a non-trivial application using Adobe Flex (http://www.rcadvisor.com), an application framework that sits on top of Flash. Think 'platform-independent Silverlight with a couple year lead'. Sun is going to get into this space soon with JavaFX. My first version was made using Dojo (an AJAX library). I'm glad I switched. In the most part, Flex works very well. I use Linux for all my development, and Flash works fine. There are issues with Opera, but it is not a supported browser (under Linux), anyway. Adobe is not afraid to tackle big complex development projects (it's all relative I suppose, but you know what I mean). To keep costs down, they use a ton of Indian developers. Quick distributed development of complex projects leads to lots of bugs. Take a look at their bug database at http://bugs.adobe.com/. Scary. Open source software is just as buggy, and I'm only using the open source core of Flex, anyway. But I feel bad for the folks that pay $700 for the Professional version of Flex and find themselves hitting bug after bug.
Flash is a platform
Posted May 22, 2008 16:13 UTC (Thu) by lysse (subscriber, #3190) [Link]
Should I feel good or bad that I can't use anything you develop?
Flash is a platform
Posted May 27, 2008 12:56 UTC (Tue) by massimiliano (subscriber, #3048) [Link]
Of course, working on Mono I'm biased, but...
Think 'platform-independent Silverlight with a couple year lead'.
...the reality is that Flash (and Flex) are "platform-independent" only on paper, and in practice work only where Adobe cares to release its plugin (and ofter poorly even there, seeing all the issues we have with Flash on Linux).
Silverlight, on the other hand, has a Free Software implementation
(Moonlight) which is "blessed" as the official implementation on
Linux, while remaining Free.
IMHO, this is way better then the Flash situation, and it's not something
that we have to wait for, it's already there.
So, choosing Flex over Silverlight for purely technical reasons is something I can understand, but choosing it because it is "platform-independent" is something I don't get...
Just my two cents.
Adobe releases Flash Player 10 beta
Posted May 17, 2008 22:24 UTC (Sat) by daniel (subscriber, #3181) [Link]
Another incompatible flash player, with Adobe encouraging site operators to post content that breaks compatibility with currently deplyed players? And what point does this become "harm to consumers" and thus actionable under anti-trust statutes?