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No more Flash for Firefox on Linux
Adobe has announced
that its proprietary Flash plugin will be moving to a new "Pepper" API for
interaction with the browser, leaving the old Netscape plugin API behind.
"For Flash Player releases after 11.2, the Flash Player browser
plugin for Linux will only be available via the 'Pepper' API as part of the
Google Chrome browser distribution and will no longer be available as a
direct download from Adobe. Adobe will continue to provide security updates
to non-Pepper distributions of Flash Player 11.2 on Linux for five years
from its release."
(Log in to post comments)
No more Flash for Firefox on Linux Posted Feb 22, 2012 15:05 UTC (Wed) by wonder (guest, #64293) [Link]
I hope Mozilla steps up and add support for this new plugin API as soon as possible.
No more Flash for Firefox on Linux Posted Feb 22, 2012 15:09 UTC (Wed) by ewan (subscriber, #5533) [Link]
Doesn't sound quite that simple - if Adobe aren't going to distribute the new plugin directly, only via Google as part of Chrome, it would be tricky to get the thing even if you had an interface to plug it into.
No more Flash for Firefox on Linux Posted Feb 22, 2012 15:17 UTC (Wed) by cmm (guest, #81305) [Link]
what's tricky about requiring the user to install Chrome and asking them for the path to the right .so?
No more Flash for Firefox on Linux Posted Feb 22, 2012 16:26 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] If you'll recall that "right .so" is called /opt/google/chrome/chrome and includes not just Flash but also the whole 70MB browser… well, it's tricky indeed…
No more Flash for Firefox on Linux Posted Feb 22, 2012 16:33 UTC (Wed) by cmm (guest, #81305) [Link]
huh, I was so sure it's still a .so that I didn't even bother to check. :)
oops, then.
No more Flash for Firefox on Linux Posted Feb 22, 2012 17:31 UTC (Wed) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link] There's a 17 MB libgcflashplayer.so in /opt/google/chrome (at least on my box). I'm wondering if Firefox could load in that file...?
No more Flash for Firefox on Linux Posted Feb 22, 2012 20:57 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Probably. AFAICS that's NPAPI version of Flash which is scheduled to go away.
No more Flash for Firefox on Linux Posted Feb 22, 2012 23:16 UTC (Wed) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link] Interesting... I'm curious, does Chrome help itself to all available NPAPI plugins found on the local installation? When I navigate to chrome://plugins I see all the MPlayerPlug-In media player plugins I had compiled/installed for Firefox (but obviously, Chrome found them and chose to use them). Weird... (or maybe not)
No more Flash for Firefox on Linux Posted Feb 23, 2012 4:28 UTC (Thu) by vapier (subscriber, #15768) [Link]
did you compile those for firefox, or did you compile those for the NPAPI ? most likely the latter.
No more Flash for Firefox on Linux Posted Feb 22, 2012 15:46 UTC (Wed) by slashdot (guest, #22014) [Link]
Just have Firefox automatically download Chrome and extract the plugin.
Pretty bizarre situation though, maybe either Google or Adobe will actually make proper standalone releases.
No more Flash for Firefox on Linux Posted Feb 23, 2012 18:35 UTC (Thu) by kripkenstein (subscriber, #43281) [Link]
> Just have Firefox automatically download Chrome and extract the plugin.
That won't work. Chrome will use Flash through the Pepper plugin API, a new API that is only in Chrome (not Gecko, not WebKit, and nowhere else).
No more Flash for Firefox on Linux Posted Feb 24, 2012 2:03 UTC (Fri) by Trelane (subscriber, #56877) [Link]
Is there no way to implement a wrapper, a la nspluginwrapper?
No more Flash for Firefox on Linux Posted Feb 24, 2012 2:54 UTC (Fri) by kripkenstein (subscriber, #43281) [Link]
No. Pepper exposes a huge set of functionalities - rendering, networking, audio - that would likely be used by something like Flash, and would require a lot of new code, since none of that is in the old NPAPI.
I hope Mozilla funds Gnash development Posted Feb 22, 2012 15:19 UTC (Wed) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]
I hope Mozilla steps up and funds the development of Gnash, so we can all say good riddance to Adobe.
I hope Mozilla funds Gnash development Posted Feb 22, 2012 15:23 UTC (Wed) by Kit (guest, #55925) [Link]
I would rather say 'good riddance' to Flash! And any other browser plugins, while we're at it...
I hope Mozilla funds Gnash development Posted Feb 22, 2012 16:28 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
That's a lovely sentiment, but wishing flash away isn't going to make all the content that people want to access online go away also.
I am hoping, personally, that the newer Pepper API will be much better then the old Netscape API. Allow it to be secured properly, interact with X better, get acceleration easier, and all that happy stuff.
I hope Mozilla funds Gnash development Posted Feb 22, 2012 16:39 UTC (Wed) by loevborg (guest, #51779) [Link]
Really, changing the way plugins work is a desperate necessity. It is still, after many years, not possible to close a browser window using ^W if your a Flash object has focus or even if your mouse cursor is hovering above it, because the plugin traps all keyevents. Now if that's not a ridiculous bug, what is? The last time I checked, this worked neither in Firefox nor in Chrome. The good news is that maybe this will change in the future. The bad news is that Chrome has implemented the new API for a while and AFAIK it still doesn't work in that browser.
I hope Mozilla funds Gnash development Posted Feb 22, 2012 16:54 UTC (Wed) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] I have great difficulty calling that a "ridiculous" bug, simply because it's far easier to recognize it as a bug than it is to describe a sufficiently good solution to it. (The trivially obvious solution is also not sufficiently good, IMO.)
I hope Mozilla funds Gnash development Posted Feb 22, 2012 18:10 UTC (Wed) by slashdot (guest, #22014) [Link]
Sounds like a feature.
Otherwise, you couldn't implement a game using Ctrl+W for a game action.
I hope Mozilla funds Gnash development Posted Feb 22, 2012 18:42 UTC (Wed) by marm (guest, #53705) [Link]
Sounds rather like a misfeature, or more specifically like optimizing for a very rare case.
Which is worse? Breaking a couple of Flash applications which use strange key combinations, or breaking ALL keyboard shorcuts for users of ALL Flash applications? The choice should not be hard :)
Besides, you can always add a "forward all keystrokes to this applet" toggle, which can be used in the exceptional cases.
I hope Mozilla funds Gnash development Posted Feb 22, 2012 23:04 UTC (Wed) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
how can an application (flash or javascript) know what keystroke combinations are going to be grabbed by the browser?
I run in to this situation with a javascript app (shell in a box, running command line tools on a remote machine), on firefox the <cntl> T goes to the app, on chrome it goes to the browser.
which is better? having some portions of the app unavailable? or having some portions of the browser unavailable?
in my case it's more annoying to have the portions of the app unavailable, but I can understand how other people would want it the other way.
the particular command-line app that I run into trouble with most frequently pre-dates the start of firefox, let alone chrome, so you can't blame the app for using a 'reserved' key combination.
think about this a bit more, how can a browser know what key combinations are reserved by the Desktop Environment? what should happen if you have a conflict there?
I hope Mozilla funds Gnash development Posted Feb 23, 2012 20:26 UTC (Thu) by marm (guest, #53705) [Link]
> how can an application (flash or javascript) know what keystroke
> combinations are going to be grabbed by the browser?
I meant that the user should be the one to make the choice, not the application.
> in my case it's more annoying to have the portions of the app unavailable, > but I can understand how other people would want it the other way.
Then make it an option in browser preferences.
I hope Mozilla funds Gnash development Posted Feb 23, 2012 11:38 UTC (Thu) by loevborg (guest, #51779) [Link]
I agree. Also, it should arguably by default not be permitted to trap a basic shortcut like ^W as it presumably is impossible to trap Windows's Alt-F4, though you might add a flag for those who like to have Emacs-style "delete word" functionality inside a Flash object.
I hope Mozilla funds Gnash development Posted Feb 23, 2012 14:54 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
Uhm. Alt-F4 in Windows just sends a WM_CLOSE message to a window which can be ignored.
Probably you're thinking about ctrl-alt-del?
I hope Mozilla funds Gnash development Posted Feb 22, 2012 16:43 UTC (Wed) by landley (guest, #6789) [Link]
I dunno about that. Don't forget that Adobe threw in the towel on flash development for phones last year:
http://www.bgr.com/2011/11/09/flash-in-the-pan-adobe-to-d...
And smartphones are to the PC what the PC was to minicomputers, and mainframes before that. Plug your phone into a USB docking station and install a native compiler, and who needs a PC anymore? (Yeah yeah, "That commodore 64 will never displace my VAX" and so on... Been there, done that. Nobody needed to visit The Computer Room when they had their own computer on their desk, and nobody needs the computer on their desk when they have one in their pocket 24/7. And Flash gave up there already.)
This whole article boils down to "Adobe abandons flash support on another platform". This is not a Flash success story, this is Flash receding in importance as HTML5 ramps up...
Rob
I hope Mozilla funds Gnash development Posted Feb 22, 2012 19:10 UTC (Wed) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link] +1 Insightful.Adobe is re-positioning all their content editing tools around HTML5. Flash on the client is on the way out, so their new plan is to convert Flash developers into developers who use newer versions of the same toolset to make HTML5.
I hope Mozilla funds Gnash development Posted Feb 23, 2012 10:50 UTC (Thu) by liljencrantz (subscriber, #28458) [Link]
And a fine plan it is. Some Adobe products are actually very nice, developing a Flash app is often significantly easier than solving the same problem with HTML5. Not because HTML5 is inferior, but because the HTML5 development tools are inferior to those Adobe sells for Flash. But Adobe have been completely terrible at providing a high quality flash browser plug-in. This way, web developers get some very nice options on how to produce their content, but we all get a platform independent, open, fast and bug free web.
I hope Mozilla funds Gnash development Posted Feb 22, 2012 23:44 UTC (Wed) by motk (subscriber, #51120) [Link] And smartphones are to the PC what the PC was to minicomputersPeople keep saying this. I'd need a lot of convincing to believe that Android and ios and WebOS can realistically take the place of a desktop OS, even if a PC eventually ends up being a 24" ipad. Viz Flash vs HTML5 - yep, complete agreement.
I hope Mozilla funds Gnash development Posted Feb 23, 2012 0:12 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
> People keep saying this. I'd need a lot of convincing to believe that Android and ios and WebOS can realistically take the place of a desktop OS
with something like the Ubuntu/android combination, I see a good possibility of this happening for many people (not everyone by any means)
the PC didn't do everything that a minicomputer could do, let alone do it as fast, but it was easier to get going, and far cheaper (again making it far easier to get going with)
With the ability to use a keyboard with your phone, and use a random TV as a display, it becomes very convenient to use your phone for many of the things that a laptop can do. think of it as the next step from a netbook, but you don't sacrifice screen size when doing real work.
No more Flash for Firefox on Linux Posted Feb 22, 2012 15:22 UTC (Wed) by Ford_Prefect (subscriber, #36934) [Link]
Someone pointed me to this -- https://wiki.mozilla.org/NPAPI:Pepper
No more Flash for Firefox on Linux Posted Feb 22, 2012 15:28 UTC (Wed) by kmike (guest, #5260) [Link]
"Mozilla is not interested in or working on Pepper at this time."
I would think they'd be interested on extending and improving the (almost decade old) NPAPI interface. Oh well.
No more Flash for Firefox on Linux Posted Feb 22, 2012 15:34 UTC (Wed) by oliwarner (subscriber, #81320) [Link]
That page (and its content) is from almost a year ago.
Hopefully Adobe's move will put more emphasis on the importance of a single cross-platform, cross-browser plugin architecture, and Mozilla will change their minds.
No more Flash for Firefox on Linux Posted Feb 22, 2012 17:20 UTC (Wed) by drago01 (subscriber, #50715) [Link]
No more Flash for Firefox on Linux Posted Feb 23, 2012 5:22 UTC (Thu) by geuder (subscriber, #62854) [Link]
Looks like both Adobe and Mozilla agree: Why putting resources for something with a somewhat questionable future on a marginal platform like desktop Linux. After all the announcement says "on Linux". So NPAPI and thereby FF seem to be supported by Adobe on Windows even in the future.
Whether Flash really loses to HTML5 and how fast remains to be seen. But that desktop Linux drastically would gain market share seems even less likely (unfortunately).
No more Flash for Firefox on Linux Posted Feb 22, 2012 15:43 UTC (Wed) by jacktanner (guest, #70122) [Link]
I hope Mozilla steps up and ditches Flash from Firefox on all platforms. If Adobe doesn't play nicely with the open web then Adobe can kiss the open web's butt.
No more Flash for Firefox on Linux Posted Feb 22, 2012 16:02 UTC (Wed) by bawjaws (guest, #56952) [Link]
They'll still have version 11.2 (with security updates for 5 years), what features from upcoming Flash versions do you feel are of such vital necessity that Mozilla should divert their developer attention away from other matters?
No more Flash for Firefox on Linux Posted Feb 22, 2012 17:38 UTC (Wed) by kragil (subscriber, #34373) [Link]
https://wiki.mozilla.org/NPAPI:Pepper
"Mozilla is not interested in or working on Pepper at this time. See the Chrome Pepper pages."
No more Flash for Firefox on Linux Posted Feb 22, 2012 17:40 UTC (Wed) by kragil (subscriber, #34373) [Link]
I swear the above comments were not there when I posted ;-) You have to believe me!!
No more Flash for Firefox on Linux Posted Feb 24, 2012 17:30 UTC (Fri) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link]
Not going to happen. Pepper is a big pile of non-standard Chrome-only APIs. Reverse-engineering and implementing all that, just for desktop Linux, when users will still have download Chrome to get Flash, just isn't worth it. The Web will be better off if we invest to make Flash (post-11.2) irrelevant.
No more Flash for Firefox on Linux Posted Feb 22, 2012 15:34 UTC (Wed) by moltonel (guest, #45207) [Link]
Sounds like Adobe is basically outsourcing their linux browser plugin to Google. Or like Adobe wanted to give up on linux, but then Google decided to pick up the pieces. Adobe never ceces to... amaze me.
Here's hoping that this is yet another sign of flash being on the way out, and that gnash/lightspark will eventually be able to catch up with a no-longer-moving target.
No more Flash for Firefox on Linux Posted Feb 22, 2012 16:14 UTC (Wed) by pataphysician (guest, #73773) [Link]
Basically, for example Microsoft is not going to use Flash for their Metro version of their browser in Windows 8. So it seems like only Google has any interest in Flash, out of the Big three of MS, Apple, Google.
Abobe realizes browser flash is dying, and need to put all their developers on Air in a last ditch effort to save some of their development market in this area. So they have slashed Flash development effort.
I think Google now has the only mobile platform that Adobe updated to version 11 with Android. I think Google sees value in being the somewhat exclusive domain of having flash, and Adobe feels they can't support a full development across all platforms, especially when some platforms seem hostile to it's presence, so they are also interested in giving Google as much exclusivity as possible.
No more Flash for Firefox on Linux Posted Feb 22, 2012 16:33 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
Which is pretty hilarious because Google is the major backer for Vp8 and a major one for various HTML5 initiatives.
I guess we can expect that Vp8 will work in Flash in future versions.
No more Flash for Firefox on Linux Posted Feb 22, 2012 17:00 UTC (Wed) by dowdle (subscriber, #659) [Link]
VP8 supposedly already works in Flash... or was that just VP6?
No more Flash for Firefox on Linux Posted Feb 22, 2012 21:00 UTC (Wed) by drago01 (subscriber, #50715) [Link]
Just VP6 ... they promised vp8 / webm support but without any ETA and still have not implemented it.
No more Flash for Firefox on Linux Posted Feb 22, 2012 23:15 UTC (Wed) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link]
Google is also the developers of NaCl and Dart. They have no problems with pushing Chrome-only technologies which technically anyone can implement but which actually nobody will.
No more Flash for Firefox on Linux Posted Feb 23, 2012 23:37 UTC (Thu) by scientes (guest, #83068) [Link]
Agreed in terms of the horrible Active-X like NaCl, however SPDY and NPN are good IMHO, and have been implemented as a opt-in in Firefox 13. (server support for SPDY on the other hand is quite lagging--I've only seen ruby eventmachine, and an announcement that nginx support is in development)
No more Flash for Firefox on Linux Posted Feb 23, 2012 19:03 UTC (Thu) by intgr (subscriber, #39733) [Link]
> Which is pretty hilarious because Google is the major backer for Vp8 and a
> major one for various HTML5 initiatives.
Let's not forget that back when the HTML5 initiative started, both Google and Apple were against Flash. It was only later that Google realized they can use Flash support on Android as a competitive advantage against iPhone.
No more Flash for Chromium too? Posted Feb 22, 2012 15:45 UTC (Wed) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]
So Linux Flash will be Chrome-only now? And it looks like even Chromium, which will have the Pepper interface, won't be able to get Flash, since it will be distributed only as part of Chrome.
And this is after Adobe decided to kill mobile Flash (after Apple severely wounded it). I wonder why Adobe doesn't just kill off Flash entirely.
No more Flash for Firefox on Linux Posted Feb 22, 2012 16:01 UTC (Wed) by Aissen (subscriber, #59976) [Link]
A bit more context:
- a Mozilla engineer on Pepper (2010): https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/plugin-futures/2010-Ap...
Let's hope that 5 years after 11.2 is released (when it reaches its end of life), Flash will be less relevant.
No more Flash for Firefox on Linux Posted Feb 22, 2012 16:46 UTC (Wed) by landley (guest, #6789) [Link]
It's already less relevant.
http://www.bgr.com/2011/12/07/as-adobe-flash-fades-from-m...
Adobe's move is an effect, not a cause. They're going the way of RealAudio and they know it, that's why they've stopped throwing good engineering effort after bad.
No more Flash for Firefox on Linux Posted Feb 22, 2012 19:19 UTC (Wed) by wookey (subscriber, #5501) [Link]
Indeed, and none too soon. Flash has always been an unpleasant proprietary stain on our mostly-open web (and far too many supposedly Free Software developers went along with that by making no effort to use, test or fix the free alternatives).
Helping kill it off is one the few good things Apple ever did for us.
It'll never be entirely gone, but I'd like to think that in 5 years time we can put the embarassing flash period behind us (assuming we can still get consumer hardware to run free code on, and haven't been ARM-UEFI'd to death instead).
Shumway, a SWF renderer in JavaScript Posted Feb 22, 2012 22:52 UTC (Wed) by cpeterso (guest, #305) [Link]
Mozilla is supporting "Shumway", an HTML5 technology experiment that explores building a SWF renderer in JavaScript. Shumway is a continuation of an earlier project called "Gordon".
https://github.com/mozilla/shumway
For those curious as to who Gordon Shumway is:
:)
Shumway, a SWF renderer in JavaScript Posted Feb 23, 2012 7:14 UTC (Thu) by jonasj (guest, #44344) [Link]
Clever name choice (with there being no pop-culture reference called "FWS" to choose from :)
No more Flash for Firefox on Linux Posted Feb 24, 2012 0:59 UTC (Fri) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link]
More gasoline on the burning platform.
Now would be a good time for Apple to ban it from Safari-- in the name of user experience, of course.
No more Flash for Firefox on Linux Posted Feb 24, 2012 2:06 UTC (Fri) by Trelane (subscriber, #56877) [Link]
As much as I'd love for Flash to die, at least I can stream Hulu and Amazon with it. Netflix refuses to support Linux.
No more Flash for Firefox on Linux Posted Feb 24, 2012 7:42 UTC (Fri) by luya (subscriber, #50741) [Link]
Netflix will soon regret that decision when a rival supporting Linux will outclass it.
No more Flash for Firefox on Linux Posted Mar 16, 2013 17:57 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] Netflix will soon regret that decision [not to work on Linux] when a rival supporting Linux will outclass it. Netflix's rival will reach the same conclusion as Netflix: few people use Netflix on a desktop computer and hardly anybody has a Linux desktop computer and it costs money to develop and maintain Linux capability. The best thing that could happen to Netflix is that its rivals spend more money than they make on something.
No more Flash for Firefox on Linux Posted Feb 27, 2012 18:54 UTC (Mon) by eklitzke (subscriber, #36426) [Link]
There's actually an HTML5 "DRM" API being proposed right now by Google, Microsoft, and Netflix. I don't really know the details, but the idea is that they want to make it possible to encrypted video/audio streaming. Incidentally, this type of feature is primarily why a lot of other sites that stream copyrighted content (e.g. Pandora, Rdio) are also "stuck" on Flash.
There are a lot of open questions about whether or not the proposal will be accepted by the web standards community (as you might imagine there's a lot of resistance), but it seems like this could be the death knell of Flash.
No more Flash for Firefox on Linux Posted Feb 28, 2012 14:14 UTC (Tue) by lyda (subscriber, #7429) [Link]
Yes, this is exactly what Adobe needs to do - reduce the number of platforms their proprietary crap runs on. At this point Flash is like the software version of an anorexic zombie. It's dead, still twitching but is slowly reducing the places it can twitch.
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