SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
PCWorld reports that Adobe has decided to start supporting Flash player on Linux again. This seems to entail mostly security updates for now and not many new features. Also, Flash seems to be on the decline. However, it is still likely welcome news for those required to use sites with Flash, and who do not want to use Chrome browser..
Adobe just pulled a major about-face. After axing the NPAPI Flash plugin used by Firefox and other browsers on Linux in 2012, Adobe has decided to begin updating it again and to keep it updated after the previously announced 2017 end-of-life date.
The NPAPI version of Flash for Linux, used by Firefox and other browsers, has been stuck at version 11.2 since 2012. Adobe also axed its Adobe Reader and Adobe AIR software for Linux. Adobe's been providing security updates for Flash since then, but promised it would stop doing so in 2017.
The PPAPI Flash plugin for Linux, which is included with Google Chrome, has been kept up to date with the latest features. But many browsers, such as Firefox, must use the NPAPI plugin instead of the PPAPI plugin
Adobe just had a sudden change of heart and decided to update the NPAPI plugin for Linux. The NPAPI Flash plugin for Linux is about to catapult from version 11.2 to version 23 and will stay current with the other Flash plugins going forward. "We have done this significant change to improve security and provide additional mitigation to the Linux community," reads Adobe's blog post on the subject.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 26 2016, @11:26PM
They just want PR and to lock in the growing Linux demographics. A sure sign of impending death when Adobe courts Linux...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 27 2016, @12:42AM
Agreed, Adobe on Linux is like wearing pants with your butt exposed by a massive cloth defect.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Tuesday September 27 2016, @02:28AM
No, Adobe is like wearing ass-less chaps with a Vaseline dispenser attached to your hip.
You're ready to be bent over and taken to town anytime the Internet feels like it :)
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Gaaark on Tuesday September 27 2016, @03:00AM
I was thinking more of a wardrobe malfunction, but hey.... ya got a newsletter? :)
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 3, Funny) by driverless on Tuesday September 27 2016, @04:12AM
In related news, the CDC has warned that measles, scarlet fever, whooping cough and tuberculosis have all reappeared in the US in recent times.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 26 2016, @11:32PM
Something I spotted in the last week:
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by moondrake on Tuesday September 27 2016, @09:00AM
So..one of the good things of Flash was that I new the video ends up somewhere in a /proc node and I can copy it to a different location. Is something like this also possible with the HTML5 player?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 27 2016, @02:12PM
Yes. Right click inside the video and you can often download the video directly or get the video URL. Programs like youtube-dl also allow ready download of videos from many sites other than youtube.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Tuesday September 27 2016, @10:07AM
Annoyingly, some websites still require Flash.
All major online casinos use Flash. The BBC and the UK's Channel 4 both use Flash for news clips, unless you are on mobile.
I figure things have at least got to the point where no-one is making anything new that uses Flash, but it is still sometimes unavoidable.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 27 2016, @02:15PM
All major casinos that are ripping you off require Flash.
For BBC why not just install User Agent Switcher and make your desktop "mobile"?
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Monday September 26 2016, @11:51PM
I haven't used that buggy crap on *any* machines in years.
It's unstable, riddled with security holes and doesn't provide any functionality that isn't replicated by other, better tools.
Every few months I find myself on a page with a box that says some useless crap about Flash, but it hasn't negatively affected my browsing at all.
I'm not sure why CoolHand even bothered submitting this.
Perhaps the title should be changed to "Adobe Revives Flash for Firefox on Linux, And Not A Fuck Was Given"?
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 3, Informative) by CoolHand on Tuesday September 27 2016, @12:33AM
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job-Douglas Adams
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday September 27 2016, @01:24AM
I haven't used Flash in a long time. I remember that a couple different stories came out about the demise of Flash, and one of the major players was simply not going to support it any longer.
Since I'm a distro hopper, I simply didn't install Flash on the last couple installations. Yes, there are sites that remind you that you need Adobe Flash to view their content, but I just move on to another site with similar content. I miss Flash less and less.
We're gonna be able to vacation in Gaza, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran and maybe Minnesota soon. Incredible times.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Tuesday September 27 2016, @02:35AM
You're not missing much. I turn it off everywhere I can and only let it run on YouTube occasionally.
"HTML5 YouTube Everywhere" - It's broken at the moment, but it shows how once anyone opens the door to HTML5 video instead that many refuse to use anything else.
I've made a couple of websites with video, and that is all HTML5 too. That will kill Adobe in the long run since even THEY have HTML5 authoring tools now.
Which makes it more of a legacy supporting activity than anything. The writing is on the wall for Flash, and Adobe knows it.
Continue disregarding Flash :)
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 27 2016, @02:20PM
I don't have Flash installed on either my Winders (work) or several Linux (home) boxen. I haven't found anything on youtube that won't play. You can comfortably abandon Flash and that extension.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Tuesday September 27 2016, @03:15AM
What's "similar content" to, say, Weebl and Bob? Or to the Flash games on Newgrounds? It's too bad Mozilla Shumway got cancelled.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday September 27 2016, @06:10PM
*groan* You're sounding like my wife, and her flash games.
I had her weaned off of Windows, and she was quite happy on Ubuntu, until Adobe and Canonical repeatedly screwed up her flash games. She purchased the parts, built a new computer, and installed Windows 7 because those silly games were that important to her. Weebl and Bob I know nothing about. Are they really unique?
TBH, I never *really* liked flash anyway. It always seemed an expensive way to package content, of any kind. Living in Outback, Nowhere, with limited bandwidth, I am very much aware that flash eats bandwidth. Similar content delivered by HTML5 uses less bandwidth. And, less CPU resources as well!
We're gonna be able to vacation in Gaza, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran and maybe Minnesota soon. Incredible times.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Wednesday September 28 2016, @12:59AM
Homestar Runner and Weebl and Bob are vector animations. There are two ways to present a vector animation: client-side rendering or pre-rendering.
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Tuesday September 27 2016, @04:00AM
But...but...Nevada County Scooper hosts lots of flash ads and click bait.
The Musk/Trump interview appears to have been hacked, but not a DDOS hack...more like A Distributed Denial of Reality.
(Score: 2) by Chromium_One on Monday September 26 2016, @11:55PM
Still not reinstalling it.
When you live in a sick society, everything you do is wrong.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by NCommander on Tuesday September 27 2016, @12:11AM
I suspect a lot of this is due to the use of Linux in embedded devices. The Flash PPAPI plugin is only distributed as part of Google Chrome, and while it can be used with Chromium, the license would prevent redistribution as such. Firefox on the other hand is easy to modify as long as you remove the trademark references (which is the default build options), and easy to expand and build on. Gecko, at least historically, is not horridly difficult to intergrate into other applications, and anything using Gecko can use NPAPI.
I still don't really understand why they axed it in the first place, given Windows/Firefox still uses the NPAPI API; theorically it should be identical on Linux as most of the APIs Flash depends on have been relatively static for years.
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Tuesday September 27 2016, @01:44AM
I suspect its funded by the NSA.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Tuesday September 27 2016, @09:56AM
I suspect the newer branch diverged so much that was getting too troublesome to maintain the old one so they decided it will be easier to maintain a single cross-platform code base.
I also believe Chrome's recent announcement about abandoning Flash support next year spelled out doom and gloom for a company that knew the 11 branch was never really secure but needed to fake it so they wouldn't look too pro-Chrome.
compiling...
(Score: 1) by stretch611 on Tuesday September 27 2016, @02:06PM
I suspect a lot of this is due to the use of Linux in embedded devices.
I suspect that embedded devices are not a good fit for flash. With limited processor and resources bloatware does not work very well.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 4, Insightful) by sjames on Tuesday September 27 2016, @12:23AM
Chrome is phasing flash out entirely, Growing numbers of high traffic sites are switching to HTML5 for video (about the only useful thing flash ever did). Growing consensus is that Flash simply isn't ever going to be reasonably secure.
It's like Adobe has been sleeping under a rock for the last 5 years and just realized people might just be ready to do without them.
(Score: 2) by fishybell on Tuesday September 27 2016, @02:53AM
Since they never really stopped releasing security updates for the 11.2 version, I have to wonder how much of this is "wow it's easier to fix the bugs in one code base instead of two," rather than "let's make Linux users happy." Ain't nothing wrong with that of course.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 27 2016, @02:56PM
Flash only makes Linux users sad.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 27 2016, @07:18AM
Years ago, Flash for Windows was on version 11, while Linux Flash was stuck somewhere around version 6. At some point Adobe decided that Linux was becoming big enough to revive Flash on Linux, and we got version 11.
Sure we may get version 23, but then we'll be stuck on that until Flash on Windows reaches version 45 (or Flash finally dies).
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ledow on Tuesday September 27 2016, @07:34AM
Just in time to be too late.
Anyone who installs Chrome is going to have the PPAPI version, and going forward every content provider is looking at HTML5 because things like Flash DO NOT WORK on Apple devices (Chrome on Apple iPad is just Webkit in a wrapper as you're not allowed to have your own rendering engine on iPad!), have security problems, etc.
It's literally four or five years too late for anything like this, and everyone else has moved on because they did nothing about it for so long.
When even the educational suppliers I deal with have been HTML-ising their decades of content, you know it's game over. Those guys were still clinging to Quicktime, Macromedia Director and Shockwave into this decade...
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 27 2016, @07:48AM
Not so long ago VMware made the (braindead) decision to redo all their management tools in flash.
In fact, they made that decision when most of the world was already quite committed to letting flash die.
When the new flash based tools came out, they required flash features that where not in the NPAPI flash.
So linux users where forced to install chromium in order to manage VMware.
Makes one wonder if one has to do something with the other.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 27 2016, @12:06PM
Now reivive the seven year long dead Adobe Reader. More relevant than diying flash.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 27 2016, @03:15PM
Why would you want that? There are better, far lighter readers out there.
E.g. SumatraPDF - http://www.sumatrapdfreader.org/ [sumatrapdfreader.org]
(Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Tuesday September 27 2016, @05:48PM
You know we're talking about Linux, right? A link to a Windows-only PDF reader isn't really helpful.
There are Linux PDF readers other than Adobe's, yes, but Adobe's is sometimes required for cases where someone decides to use Adobe's "PDF form online submission" feature instead of setting up an actual website. Apparently certain national tax organizations are known to be idiots like this.