SCALE 8x: Gnash, the free Flash player

Indeed. I started using gnash a couple of years ago when it became too hard to use the net flashless, and it's come on in leaps and bounds since then. It's still pretty hit and miss what works, but overall it's a very capable substitute for adobe's flashplugin.

I am sometimes dismayed at how many allegedly hardcore free-software developers can't be bothered to use the free option and just install adobe's flashplayer for an easy life. It's important that we use the free tools so that web-developers get complaints about their flash stuff causing problems, and gnash developers get to know what's still broken. Average users aren't going to swap just yet, so we are the ones that need to bear the pain during development. That pain is now very bearable (youtube works fine :-) and so do nearly all silly flash menus).

There was a tiresome false dawn on Debian at least where youtube worked (hooray!) and then broke again for about a year (boo!, but at least there is clive and youtube-dl). Now it is back, and muich else besides.

The BBC on the other hand deserve a good kicking as their enormous news video output has never worked with gnash SFAICT (and is not available via get_iplayer).

Rob is clearly a genius and deserves really stonking amounts of Free Beer.