Adobe will no longer provide new releases of Flash Player for Linux after version 11.2, the company has today announced.
Google will, instead, take over the implementation of Flash Player via a new plugin API called ‘Pepper‘.
The pair-up means that Linux users using Google’s Chrome browser will still be able to benefit from new Flash Player features and improvements. Google are expected to begin shipping the new Pepper-based version of Flash player in Google Chrome later this year.
In their short statement, Adobe write: -
“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 aren’t jumping ship entirely. Security updates for Flash Player 11.2 will continue to be provided for five years following its release.
As all well and good as promoting the Pepper API is there is one glaring caveat: the only browser using it (at present) is Google Chrome.
Mozilla, the company behind Firefox, have no plans to add the technology to their own browser, and it’s unlikely to find favour with other, smaller browsers who lack the development resources to integrate the feature.
Although Pepper will ship in the Windows and OS X builds of Google Chrome Adobe will continue distributing new and improved versions of the Flash Player for those two platforms in the traditional way.
Flash is a dying technology anyway, so who cares ?
In my opinion, Flash is a bug ridden, resource hungry, security flawed, hunk of cr*p … I’ll be glad when it’s dead and buried :o
I don’t see this as an anti-Linux move … more that Flash is dying and Adobe know it, so they’re trimming development (handing it to Google) … they’ll keep scraping the last few pennies from it on the Windows platform, but it IS dead (being replaced with HTML-5 and other more open technologies), in a weird kinda way this means Linux/Android (along with Apple iOS) are ahead of the game
Google also heavily support Firefox, so I wouldn’t panic if I were you
The lack of Flash hasn’t hurt the sales of Apple iOS devices (iPad/iPod/iPhone) … if anything it’s just hastened the demise of Flash … the one thing I thank Apple for.
I agree with you 100%. I’ve been using YouTube’s HTML5 experimental player, as well as Vimeo’s HTML5 player and boy does it make a difference, I can actually watch videos, without it lagging constantly. They lag from time to time, but I know there is always going to be that error between my laptop and Natty, other than that, it’s good news that flash is dying.
Not so good for the government and secret agencies that spy on us, but it means there’s less chance of people finding out my personal data etc.
If flash is dying, that must be good for Adobe since it must cost them millions in R&D. It’ll be on less thing for them to worry about, the way I see it. But what will they bring to the table next? That’s the question.
Now your speaking my language! I’d love to see a port of Premier on Linux as well, so that Lightworks has competition on both platforms. (Win & Linux).
Have Lightworks released an alpha/beta for Linux yet ? … I seem to remember December (2011) being talked about as a proposed alpha release date on their forum a few months ago, but haven’t seen anything since
Nope it hasn’t been released due to stability issues. I’m glad they’re working on fixing the stability issues rather than just tossing it out there and saying “ah what the heck”.
From what I know, the main problem seems to be, porting Lightworks and having to re-architect a very large application to make it OS-agnostic. However… Displaying the video on the screen efficiently has presented some challenges as well; The Lightworks playback engine is very multithreaded - so when playing back a video, the main UI thread is largely idle, whilst the images are prepared and displayed in numerous background threads. When using OpenGL/X, it causes problems; if you call glXSwapBuffers() in one thread, but another thread is already calling XNextEvent(), you don’t get a synchronous swap - in fact, you don’t get a swap at all until the next UI event arrives (a mouse-move for example). In simple terms - the video doesn’t update unless you move the mouse, etc. They’ve got around this so far by using multiple connections to the X server, but it’s required a lot of head-scratching…
Yup, because if they can nail the stability issues, I for one will be the first among many video editors out there to jump on it and push it to extreme use. They’ve also made a port to OS X as well, so they’ve really got the upper hand here on Adobe, perhaps this will finally grab Adobe’s attention and bring their Creative Suite to Linux? I hope so. Having a native version of Photoshop and After Effects would just be the cherry on my cupcake.
I hope that Lightworks will support the decoding/transcoding of AVCHD.
I’d love to see a port of Premier on Linux as well, so that Lightworks has competition on both platforms. (Win & Linux).