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Linux Now an Equal Flash Player
Posted by
timothy
on Wed Oct 15, 2008 03:12 PM
from the cheek-by-jowl dept.
from the cheek-by-jowl dept.
nerdyH writes "As recently as 2007, Linux users waited six months for Flash 9 to arrive. Now, with Microsoft pushing its Silverlight alternative, Adobe is touting the universality of its Flash format, which has penetrated '98 percent of Internet-enabled desktops,' it claims. And, it today released Flash 10 for Linux concurrently with other platforms. Welcome to the future." Handily enough, Real Networks released this summer RealPlayer 11 for Linux, the first release for which they've included a .deb package, and offers nightly builds of their Helix player, for which Linux is one of the supported platforms.
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yay competition! (Score:5, Insightful)
Now make them do the same with Photoshop.
Re:yay competition! (Score:5, Funny)
Now make them do the same with Photoshop.
Tomorrow MS will announce that Windows Paint runs under wine!
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Re:yay competition! (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't see a great number of professional graphic artists willing to brave the murky linux technowaters. They love Apple because to them it's basically a TV.
No, wait, hold your flamethrowers! I don't mean it isn't a powerful OS, what I mean is that they don't have to do anything to make their tools work. When was the last time that you needed to upgrade, configure or recompile something to watch a show on a consumer television set? Yes, the signal goes digital so you ditch the old box and get on with the shinies. Exactly as in the Mac world. Need more functionality — channels — then get cable, satellite, TiVo, younameit. No messing about with the appliance itself, just plug the add-on and bother about using it. Want a car analogy? You need know nothing about carburetors or lack thereof to drive. As long as you heed the lights on the dashboard and shell out at the mechanic when the issue goes beyond them, all a user needs to know is how to operate the thing, not how to service it.
The average /. enthusiast's personal anecdote is irrelevant because they are a vanishing small percentage of the target market. For instance, Automakers don't cater to blingers, modders and assorted $YOURHOBBY$ers, those are a niche markets serviced by niche players.
I believe this is the reason you won't see Photoshop on linux until there is a rock solid OSX-like distro that the userbase (the pros, mostly) can use with a kitchen microwave level of ease. If you are an enthusiast you'd be MUCH better off supporting GIMP with both your time and bug reports as with your bucks donating to the project. Check out 2.6, its orders of magnitude better than, say, 2.4 (my previous version).
I only wish they'd change the name to G-Imp or Imp/G or even GNU-Imp because most of the time the stupid name is the biggest objection people cite to not even give it a chance. English being my second language, the name means jack to me, but I've encountered the argument often enough...
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Some more equal than others... (Score:5, Interesting)
Looks like they changed it during they beta to require glibc 2.4-based Linux distributions (RHEL 4, CentOS 4, Debian 4 are out) for stack-smashing protection.
Link [adobe.com].
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Competition is good! (Score:5, Insightful)
YAY another binary release (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:YAY another binary release (Score:5, Insightful)
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The future? (Score:5, Insightful)
There's still no 64-bit version yet!
Re:No 64-bit (Score:5, Interesting)
My theory is that Adobe's Flash player is a horrible hack that is so utterly fragile and bug-ridden that Adobe can't actually make a 64-bit version without doing a full rewrite.
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Re:No 64-bit (Score:5, Informative)
I hate to disrupt a good theory with references, but What's So Difficult? 64-bit Edition [adobe.com] claims the main issue is that rewriting the JIT compiler to emit 64-bit code is non-trivial.
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Re:No 64-bit (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe a post from 2006 (summarizing an explanation from 2005) is not the best thing. At the end of the day, the excuses seem lame. Java had 64-bit support out pretty quickly (are you telling me the JIT in Flash is more complicated than the Java JVM, of which the JIT is a minor portion?)
The reason is that Adobe doesn't feel there's a big enough market for 64-bit platforms, thus it doesn't throw many resources at getting a 64-bit version, end of story.
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Re:No 64-bit (Score:5, Insightful)
That was also written, oh, two fucking years ago! They haven't figured out how to make their JIT compiler work in two years? What kind of incompetents are they? I'm sure it's a hard problem. Lots of problems are hard. But somehow Firefox and Opera and even IE managed to get their Javascript code working on 64bit platforms in the meantime. Why is Flash somehow special?
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Re:No 64-bit (Score:5, Funny)
The kind who would think the Flash player was a good idea in the first place.
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Re:The future? (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed; that was the first thing I checked upon reading this story.
I'm sorry, but I'd rather have a 6 month wait and a 64-bit version than concurrent releases. Linux has been running on AMD64 for what now? Three or four years? And now that Vista runs on 64-bit as well there's even less excuse for this. Hell, they're even got a version for the Sparc.
I don't mean to belittle the fact this story. It is pretty cool that Adobe seems to at least recognize linux as a worthwhile platform*, it's just that support is still rather lackluster.
(*While I would think that this would have to do with the increasingly common use of linux on embedded devices, the fact that there's no ARM version seems to contradict this. However, I suspect there's a (secret) version somewhere since I'm seen embedded linux devices that play flash.)
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Re:The future? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:The future? (Score:5, Insightful)
Or running a 64-bit system?
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Re:The future? (Score:5, Insightful)
Us nspluginwrapper.
Actually if Firefox would support 32 bit plug ins under Linux that would also solve the issue.
Or the Distros could include 32bit Firefox be default.
Both would solve the problem. And if you need Firefox to be 64bit you are surfing the wrong sites.
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Re:The future? (Score:5, Informative)
nspluginwrapper blows.
There's no nice way to put it. It crashes, or "loses connection" to the plugin half the time.
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Re:The future? (Score:4, Insightful)
Us nspluginwrapper.
nspluginwrapper is a workaround not a solution.
Actually if Firefox would support 32 bit plug ins under Linux that would also solve the issue.
Good idea, but why bother when they can port flash to arm, why not x86_64?
Or the Distros could include 32bit Firefox be default.
Both would solve the problem. And if you need Firefox to be 64bit you are surfing the wrong sites.
If you want suboptimal performance why not just go back to windows? I have a 64bit processor (it came with my laptop) I do not have 4GB of memory or edit photos but i dont see why i should accept sub optimal performance just to run a plugin, a plugin that seams to max out any version of my os anyway.
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Re:The future? (Score:5, Informative)
If you want suboptimal performance why not just go back to windows?
The performance difference between 64-bit and 32-bit is not nearly as big as between 32-bit and 16-bit. When making the transition to 32-bit, things were pretty much faster across the board. With 64-bit, the case isn't so cut and dried. On x86 machines, running in 64-bit mode, you get a couple of things. The biggest is a larger virtual address space, which lets you work with more than 4GB at once. You also get larger general purpose registers, and more registers to play with. Generally, larger registers aren't really needed. Things like MMX and SSE have already given us the ability to process data in 128-bit chunks if we need to, and I'd bet most things that really need large registers are already using SSE. More registers are nice, but they only help in compute-bound circumstances. Most of the time these days, you're I/O bound.
The downside is that in 64-bit mode, pointers are all twice as big, which means your program will need more memory and possibly memory bandwidth than the 32-bit version would. My experience is that 64-bit is usually slower, unless you have 4GB or more of RAM. Theoretically, 64-bit can be faster, but generally people don't switch because they need the faster CPU speed, they switch because they need the RAM.
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Re:The future? (Score:5, Funny)
I'm pretty sure you already do run it NAIVELY it you think that you need it to be 64 bit!
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Re:The future? (Score:5, Insightful)
*cough*Opera*cough*
But seriously, Opera now has a native 64 bit build but it runs 32 bit plugins without any special voodoo. "OMG it isn't open source" you say... well neither is flash.
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Dear Grandma, (Score:4, Informative)
Did you fix the cookies [slashdot.org] yet?
Outstanding!!!! (Score:5, Funny)
And what about the embedded version for wii/etc? (Score:5, Informative)
Equal? (Score:4, Interesting)
This is News (Score:5, Interesting)
It was worse than that... (Score:5, Informative)
Go Home Silverlight (Score:5, Funny)
Competition is good and all, but this is just annoying. It only exists to muddy the waters.
I'm just waiting for MS to announce that they will no longer speak english, but will communicate only in Anglush-Sharp. A language in which every noun is copyrighted by Microsoft and only MS approved verbs will generate an intelligible response.
Great news but... (Score:4, Insightful)
First of all, as some have already pointed out, where's the *BSD binaries and 64-bit binaries?
Why doesn't Adobe go (L)GPLv3 with their flash plugin, keep all the products that produce flashes commercial and watch how other people (while being angry at their original plugin's performance) fix their bad code?
In all seriousness, what bad could releasing flash renderer as a GPLv3 or LGPLv3 mean for adobe? They have the market for 90s style websites (one big graphic) and 100% of Internet's video sites already, their actual closed source not so well performing plugin is the first reason why people don't think flash is great for anything other than attracting teenager users.
If the do not open source it, one day it will a better alternative will grow out of the open source community or flash simply ceases to exist as it's replaced by more open standard X or better renderer Y.
Flash appearing ontop of pages in linux/firefox (Score:5, Insightful)
So did they fix the *really* annoying problem where on linux firefox configurations that flash objects appear ontop of *everything* else in the page? This annoyance has made many pages very much un-usable (especially ones with drop down menus where the menu gets hidden behind the flash object :( ...adobe's own site fits into this catagory).
Re:Flash appearing ontop of pages in linux/firefox (Score:5, Informative)
OK, Just in case anyone was about to answer...the answer is *YES*. Finally flash is useable on all sites it was intended to be!
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Now do the same for Shockwave Player (Score:5, Interesting)
Now do the same for Shockwave Player so it can be on linux as well.
Time line for flash on iphone?
Linux people, I want your platform to succeed... (Score:5, Insightful)
In your minds, if company Z doesn't support Linux, they lose. If they do support linux, they lose even worse. They get screamed at for not releasing specs, not GPL'ing the source, not supporting a specific distribution, not supporting 64-bit... the list goes on.
Now if you're going to take the time to respond to this, please answer me this: Why should company X spend the most time supporting a platform that has the least marketshare?
Linux folk see the problem being that software vendors don't support linux. The fact of the matter is Linux doesn't support ISV's. There are a million different distro's with no standardization. You already have your market share working against you, and you realize that. What you don't seem to realize is that your platform is the hardest to develop for and support.
You really should do something about this before you scream with a sense of entitlement that some company should spend time and money supporting your platform when it is not likely to be financially viable.
Re:Linux people, I want your platform to succeed.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Now if you're going to take the time to respond to this, please answer me this: Why should company X spend the most time supporting a platform that has the least marketshare?
At one point back in 1995, the Microsoft Windows market was only 20% of the PC market. The other 75% of the market was OS/2, QNX, DrDos, Novell and a few others. Windows was an emerging market so we coded for it.
Linux is now an emerging (or growth) market. Ignore it if you want. Your competitors are not.
There is a reason that google has released Picasa and GoogleEarth binaries for linux and its not because of a bunch of hippies yelling at them demanding the code. There is a reason that Dell is still continuing its Linux line of products. Asus, Adobe, Quicken, Oracle, Real, etc, do not make their product support decisions based on a bunch of screaming smelly basement dwellers.
What you don't seem to realize is that your platform is the hardest to develop for and support.
Linux is the hardest platform to develop for if all you know how to code in is Microsoft based technologies.
Enjoy,
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Re:Linux people, I want your platform to succeed.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Specific distribution: Supporting all distributions isn't hard, you know.
No. Supporting Linux is not hard at all [opera.com]. It's not like you have to release 10 different packages for each distribution you support... and stuff.
Flip it around and ask yourself why shouldn't company X spend a little time making something cross-platform (it's not as hard as you think) and get that many more sales?
You say "It's not as hard as you think." I say, "It's easier said than done."
This just screams troll right here. I find it a pain to develop for Windows myself given that libraries and headers can be all over the place, or are you thinking of RAD C# stuff that is useless for many applications (note I'm saying it's useless for things like, say, Flash; it certainly has a use for smaller programs and other apps that don't need speed, etc).
Yeah, I'm a troll. Instead of developing a modern tool chain, linux folk scream, "Emacs/VIM, the GNU toolchain and a command line debugger is all you will ever need!" Which, wherein lies the most fundamental problem of the Linux crowd, they feel entitled to tell people what they should want and need, rather than listen to what people want and need. And then you call them a troll.
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I've tried Linux Flash 10 betas (Score:4, Informative)
And the benefits (even on Flash 9 sites, without the new features in 10) are significant:
Better performance and smoother graphics
The fullscreen video mode is no longer choppy
Unfortunately, there's a significant drawback as well:
Often crashes my browser as soon as I visit a page with Flash.
(or at least crashes the plugin process, when using a browser smart enough to isolate plugins from the main system)
Obviously I got to enjoy Flash 10 for a while before it started dying on me. Wiping my .macromedia directory doesn't seem to restore the stable behavior. Neither does reinstalling flash. Did Hulu change their video format in some subtle way that breaks just my system? I don't know, but he official Flash 10 breaks too, not just the betas. Unless anyone here has any good ideas, back to 9 it is.
Gnash 0.8.4 Released Yesterday (Score:5, Insightful)
Gnash 0.8.4 was released yesterday, but I guess that doesn't merit a slashvertisement:
http://gnashdev.org/ [gnashdev.org]
Re:RealPlayer? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:RealPlayer? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:RealPlayer? (Score:5, Funny)
What's that?
It's just a story we tell to scare the kids.
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Re:RealPlayer? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah. I thought the same thing. Real represented every wrong way to market and produce a product. It was neat in the beginning (well, it was pretty much the first, as far as I know), but as time went on, it became a bloated, spyware ridden piece of garbage far inferior to all of its competitors.
Honestly, I didn't know Real was still around. I wouldn't let that software near my windows machines, much less the Linux ones.
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Re:RealPlayer? (Score:5, Informative)
Honestly, I didn't know Real was still around. I wouldn't let that software near my windows machines, much less the Linux ones.
It's funny, actually, but the Linux version of RealPlayer is not loaded with garbage. It just looks like a vanilla video player. It is not at all like the Windows version.
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Re:RealPlayer? (Score:5, Funny)
In Linux, you can view *.rm files with rm command.
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Re:RealPlayer? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:No deal. (Score:5, Informative)
umm......
GASH?
They have published the specs and the FOSS player isn't soup yet. So stop complaining and start coding buddy.
http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/ [gnu.org]
So get to work...
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Re: news is already available (Score:5, Interesting)
Most of the 64-bit work is still in the opensource Tamarin Project. You can still contribute, if you've got the chops.
http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/2006/10/whats_so_difficult_64bit_editi.html [adobe.com]
http://www.kaourantin.net/2006/11/spidermonkeys-relative-tamarin-joins.html [kaourantin.net]
The "we'll maintain it for you" line has not particularly been borne out by experience.... ;-)
jd/adobe
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Re:No deal. (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:No deal. (Score:4, Informative)
he explains that the agreement for the specs for adobe flash prohibits you from working on a competing implementation if you have ever used adobe's flash plugin. the report was made after adobe released the documentation.
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Re:All platforms? (Score:5, Informative)
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