Still waiting for Flash
Did you know...? LWN.net is a subscriber-supported publication; we rely on subscribers to keep the entire operation going. Please help out by buying a subscription and keeping LWN on the net. |
Those of us who were using Linux full-time around the turn of the century will remember that the state of web browsing on Linux was a little scary then. The only real option available was the binary-only Netscape 4 client; it was buggy and old. It really seemed like the web was going to move forward without Linux, and that there was not a whole lot we could do about it.
Things have improved somewhat on that front; we now have a few top-quality web browsers to choose between. At the same time, though, one might be forgiven for thinking that we are heading back into a similar situation, but involving Flash this time around. For all practical purposes, there is only one viable option for Flash on Linux: the binary-only plugin provided by Adobe. But that plugin is not just proprietary software; it also is somewhat old and buggy, and there is nothing we can do to fix it. For an increasing part of the web experience, we still have a second-rate, proprietary platform.
When one thinks of Flash, naturally, one thinks of video sites like YouTube. But there is more to the Flash experience than silly videos and obnoxious advertising. Some parts of Google are heavily into flash, as can be seen from that company's finance sites or analytics offerings. Your editor's children will attest that there's no end of game sites which require Flash, and for which the Linux plugin fails to work properly. Looking for any way to reduce the total amount of time spent in airplane seats, your editor recently investigated "around the world" tickets; that search ended up at this travel planning site which, of course, requires Flash. And so on. Like it or not, Flash is the language in which an increasing number of interactive sites are being coded, and Linux does not have proper support for it.
With this in mind, your editor decided to give the recently-announced Gnash 0.8.2 release a try. This release was billed as the first beta version of Gnash, so there was reason to hope that it would be something close to a true solution to the Flash problem. In reality, Gnash is a step in the right direction, but the Flash issue will be with us for some time yet.
For now, the acid test for a Flash player would appear to be YouTube, so that is the first place your editor went. The experience there was mixed. It is, in fact, possible to watch YouTube videos using the Gnash Firefox plugin. Hearing them is another matter, though; they all played silently. It would not be surprising to learn that getting audio is a matter of filling in a missing codec - but would sure be nice if the software were to say something to that effect. Pausing and playing the video worked, but skipping around in it did not. Playing videos from other sites was uniformly unsuccessful.
The "around the world" calculator appeared to load properly, but then took off as if somebody were punching all of its buttons at once. Charts on Google sites are uniformly blank. Some flash games mostly worked, others showed more input-related confusion. Few of them were truly playable. On the other hand, Flash "intros" and advertisements mostly work as intended - just what your editor wanted.
So Gnash is not really there yet. In truth, this software is not in a condition where the use of the term "beta" makes sense; there is a lot of work yet to be done. There are few of us clamoring for support for more obnoxious advertising - especially among the LWN readership, as your plentiful emails over the last couple of months have made clear. What we want is working support for the useful Flash applications out there - and there are a few of those at this point. Gnash does not, currently, provide that support. (Your editor also tried out Swfdec 0.6.0, with generally worse results).
That said, it is clear that a lot of work has been done to get Gnash to this point. Your editor has no real way to judge how much more is required to get full support for even Flash version 7; chances are it is not a small job. Needless to say, support for newer versions of Flash will require even more work. But there now appears to be a solid platform upon which that work can be done, and that is an important start. Gnash has the look of a project which has overcome some of the biggest initial hurdles and is now setting a pace to finish the job. With luck, it will have reached the point where the fact that it almost works will inspire new developers to come in and fill in the remaining pieces.
Adobe has the ability to make this job a lot easier. Your editor has heard, informally, that the company has taken a less hostile position toward the Gnash developers than it had in the past, but it certainly is still not helping them. The Flash specifications are not available to anybody trying to create a Flash player, and, unsurprisingly, the Flash EULA forbids any sort of reverse engineering. That EULA, incidentally, also forbids running Adobe's player on any "non-PC device," including tablets and phones. That restriction suggests that Adobe sees business opportunities in the lack of a free Flash player for such systems and intends to ensure that this scarcity continues. So, despite the occasionally friendly noises Adobe has been making toward the Linux community, we should not expect a great deal of help from that direction.
Someday, people will figure out that closed standards (like Flash) are best
avoided. Meanwhile, Flash is a fact of life that we will need to
deal with. It appears that we are getting closer to being able to deal
with it - but we are not there yet.
(Log in to post comments)
Still waiting for Flash
Posted Mar 11, 2008 17:04 UTC (Tue) by jmorris42 (guest, #2203) [Link]
So from what you report it sounds like the free flash player would play YouTube videos about as well as Adobe's plugin does on my machines. I.e. silently. Ok, I do get sound now... after a lot of google action and manually building libflashsupport to make it support OSS, etc even though I do have ALSA running (xmms is playing via ALSA as I type this) on one of the two machines. So if you count sound playing over a second out of sync with the video I have sound with the Adobe plugin. And both computers' Firefox became extra unstable after installing Flash. One would almost get the impression the whole idea was to make sure we have a bad experience unless we run IE on Windows. And you just know that by the time we finally have a working free flash player the hip websites will be on to some new closed tech. Feh.
Still waiting for Flash
Posted Mar 11, 2008 17:55 UTC (Tue) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link]
>So from what you report it sounds like the free flash player would play YouTube videos about as well as Adobe's plugin does on my machines. I.e. silently. Probably a permission issue. But anyway, you do not need crappy browser plugins to play YouTube (thank god!), but youtube-dl and mplayer do a better job at it, including (surprise) double-speed playing, eating much less CPU, thanks to Xvideo, SSE-optimized decoding, and the "cleanliness"¹ of free software projects' code. ¹Well, not every project. But given AdobeFlash and mplayer, I take a stance that the latter would win. Closed corporate code can be really ugly actually.
Still waiting for Flash
Posted Mar 13, 2008 9:56 UTC (Thu) by dankamongmen (subscriber, #35141) [Link]
http://home.gna.org/clive/ clive annihilates youtube-dl in all tests I've put it through. You might want to check it out. Beyond that, I've had rather better luck with the VLC Multimedia plugin than the mplayer plugin, despite using mplayer for my primary video viewing. YMMV.
libcrashsupport
Posted Mar 12, 2008 2:29 UTC (Wed) by midg3t (guest, #30998) [Link]
I too get frequent crashes with flash videos, and it only seems to happen with libflashsupport. That probably has to do with the fact that the API provides no means for the audio output layer to report errors to the flash runtime, so knickers get tied and everything goes kaboom, taking the browser down with it.
Still waiting for Flash
Posted Mar 11, 2008 17:29 UTC (Tue) by tjc (guest, #137) [Link]
> Someday, people will figure out that closed standards (like Flash) are best avoided. I doubt it. I expect the current general lack of awareness in this area is a long-term trend.
Still waiting for Flash
Posted Mar 11, 2008 18:25 UTC (Tue) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link]
The ten-year trend is toward more awareness and more openness. However, the slope is shallow. Check back in ten more years.
Still waiting for Flash
Posted Mar 11, 2008 17:39 UTC (Tue) by debacle (subscriber, #7114) [Link]
I yet have to try the new gnash, but for my only use of Flash (yes, it's youtube!) swfdec works fine. In contrast to gnash < 0.8.2. Other stuff might not work, but I believe that owners of Flash-based sites do not want me to visit them anyway. Adobe is not an option anyway, because they do not provide source code (nor a binary for my platform != i386).
Still waiting for Flash
Posted Mar 11, 2008 18:01 UTC (Tue) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link]
Flash is anything but barrier-free (accessibility), so the sooner you forget about it in websites that could perfectly do without it, the better for everyone. I agree that some browser games require it, but many a webpages just use it in places where it just is not welcome. Have a wireframe of your new product? Well, that's ok, but that does not mean the goddamn entire page/domain has to be a multimegabyte flash blob.
Still waiting for Flash
Posted Mar 11, 2008 18:16 UTC (Tue) by mmarsh (subscriber, #17029) [Link]
I get the impression that many sites use Flash specifically to make it difficult (if not effectively impossible) to scrape their content. They can also prevent you from using my preferred browsing mode: open every interesting link in a new tab, and flip between them as needed. This prevents sites from collecting "marketing data" such as how long you viewed a page before hitting the "back" button, not that that's why I browse that way.
Still waiting for Flash
Posted Mar 12, 2008 7:20 UTC (Wed) by tetromino (guest, #33846) [Link]
For what it's worth, Adobe's flash plugin has excellent accessibility support on Windows, and lets you use screen readers etc. to read flash files. AFAIK the Linux version still doesn't have any accessibility features, unfortunately; but then again, neither does Gnash.
Still waiting for Flash
Posted Mar 11, 2008 19:25 UTC (Tue) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]
"Someday, people will figure out that closed standards (like Flash) are best avoided." Not before Silverlight grabs a significant toe-hold. :-( In fact, Netflix subscribers might say that's already happened.
Still waiting for Flash
Posted Mar 12, 2008 3:11 UTC (Wed) by robertknight (guest, #42536) [Link]
> Not before Silverlight grabs a significant toe-hold. :-( Leaving the politics to one side, the short-term odds of seeing a functional and compatible free software implementation of Silverlight are better than for Flash. Even if there was no Silverlight content on the web, Moonlight would be a useful platform for developing certain kinds of desktop applications (Games, Educational and more) in its own right. Much as some of us may loath its abuses, Flash solves a need. It provides an easy way to put together graphically rich interactive media which is convenient to distribute. If someone asked for an alternative libre tool which could do the same thing, until recently I'm not sure what I could point them to.
Still waiting for Flash
Posted Mar 12, 2008 11:06 UTC (Wed) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]
"Leaving the politics to one side, the short-term odds of seeing a functional and compatible free software implementation of Silverlight are better than for Flash." True for a limited definition of "free software". I'm much more willing to leave the anti-Microsoft politics aside than I am to leave patent law aside, and there's no way anyone but Microsoft and Novell will be able to legally distribute Moonlight without paying patent royalties to Microsoft. That's not free or open-source software.
Still waiting for Flash
Posted Mar 12, 2008 14:03 UTC (Wed) by Velmont (guest, #46433) [Link]
Hum? Software patents doesn't apply in the whole world. So saying that «nobody» can do it is false. I'll distribute Monolight legally with no problem.
Still waiting for Flash
Posted Mar 12, 2008 14:08 UTC (Wed) by aigarius (subscriber, #7329) [Link]
Actually it is perfectly legal in most of the world (outside USA and Japan).
Still waiting for Flash
Posted Mar 13, 2008 1:10 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]
Unless you want to exhibit at CeBit.
Still waiting for Flash
Posted Mar 14, 2008 10:53 UTC (Fri) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link]
I'm not quite sure if the LWN report about the CeBit inicident is correct. The police raided the booth for *devices*, not for software. None of the pure software shops have been addressed so far. I don't want to adress here if it's sensible to have patents on hardware implementations of algorithms; simply want to state that this is the case in Europe. And that seems to be the legal background for the CeBit incident, not any software patent.
Still waiting for Flash
Posted Mar 11, 2008 20:16 UTC (Tue) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link]
For what it's worth, Gnash works fine with sound here. It's likely an issue of your specific audio setup. The sooner the Linux world finally freaking standardizes on a single application-level audio interface (e.g. PulseAudio) the better.
Still waiting for Flash
Posted Mar 17, 2008 5:50 UTC (Mon) by kevinbsmith (guest, #4778) [Link]
Here too. Gnash 8.1 (Ubuntu 7.10) plays youtube (and similar site) videos fine, except that it pegs the CPU at 100%. I have also found that most simple (aka "annoying") flash animations play fine. Unfortunately, I don't think I have yet found a useful flash tool that works. Perhaps that has improved in 8.2, which I will presumably have in about a month when I upgrade to the next Ubuntu release.
Still waiting for Flash
Posted Mar 20, 2008 22:50 UTC (Thu) by wertigon (guest, #42963) [Link]
Please, no. Not another sound daemon. They suck, introduce unneccessary latency and generally bogs down performance. OSS4 works fine, has extremely low latency, *is standard* on every other UNIX system but Linux and is released under BSD license; what more could one possibly want? Except the death of ALSA of course...
Still waiting for Flash
Posted Mar 21, 2008 0:37 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Your saying that PulseAudio sucks pretty much guarantees that you haven't tried it.
Still waiting for Flash
Posted Mar 21, 2008 1:37 UTC (Fri) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]
PulseAudio is brilliant. I love being able to send music to my headphones and still have the phone ring over my speakers. And being able to use my Bluetooth headset for Ekiga. And being able to have my music quiet but my IM notifications at a regular volume. OK, truth be told, I don't quite love it yet... There are still some warts to smooth out. But I'll go out on a limb and predict that in a year you'll wonder how you ever got by without PA. It's just that useful. (this is coming from a guy who would immediately turn off esd and arts first thing after installing any new system) Come to think of it, PA's flexible support for sane APIs could help ALSA to the exit over the next few years. That would be sweet.
Still waiting for Flash
Posted Mar 21, 2008 2:41 UTC (Fri) by wertigon (guest, #42963) [Link]
But, OSS4 supports all this through vmix (since you can set per-application volume through it).
You don't need the PulseAudio API with OSS4. It's an extra, unneccessary layer, and it solves nothing. How exactly is it better to introduce yet another layer adding more latency than just using OSS4, which solves everything PulseAudio does at kernel level?
Then again, there might be something I'm missing here. Feel free to point it out.
Still waiting for Flash
Posted Mar 21, 2008 13:40 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Hang on, so OSS4 provides network-transparent audio, RTSP streaming, up/downsampling and format conversion, per-application automatically-preserved volume levels and audio source/sink bindings, and a command-line interface and plugin infrastructure safely extensible by arbitrary users without any special privileges? If it does, this is an excellent example of how to do *way* too much inside the kernel. If it doesn't, this is not equivalent to PulseAudio.
Still waiting for Flash
Posted Mar 21, 2008 17:13 UTC (Fri) by wertigon (guest, #42963) [Link]
>>Hang on, so OSS4 provides network-transparent audio, RTSP streaming, Nope, these two are a special case, and are the only reason I can see a sound server for. When you want to send out a network sound stream. Then again, mpd seems to do a perfect job of this. >>up/downsampling and format conversion, per-application automatically-preserved volume levels and audio source/sink bindings Volume levels yes (as long as the vmix API is used, like you're supposed to), and channel levels as well. I'll have to get back to you on all the other stuff, but chances are good it's supported. >>Shell No, why should it? Again, the only conceivable reason I can see for a sound server is when you want to stream stuff over a network. Else, it just introduces more lag, which is the thing I'm opposed to (I'm an amateur musician btw, so I need that low-latency).
Still waiting for Flash
Posted Mar 21, 2008 18:40 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
So, er, why should it need to be extensible? I note the absence of a replacement for the PulseAudio plugin system in that list as well. I guess if you want an all-in-kernel unextensible replacement for part of PulseAudio then OSS4 provides you with that. (Oh, and mpd isn't a sufficient replacement either. Thanks to the ALSA PulseAudio plugin, *every* app you use can get its output routed via PulseAudio, which is very useful on remote systems. mpd, while nifty, does nothing of the kind, nor should it.)
Still waiting for Flash
Posted Mar 21, 2008 19:17 UTC (Fri) by wertigon (guest, #42963) [Link]
So you have listed one benefit which cannot be achieved by OSS4. Should you by some reason run a thin-client based solution ala LTSP and you need sound, OSS4 is not quite up to the task. Fair enough. As for extensibility; Why would you ever want that for sound? What exactly is it that you need scripting for? If you need to redirect the streams like PulseAudio does, then yes, PulseAudio *IS* the way to go. But most *doesn't* need this, most need/wants what we have today+reliable software mixing+per-app volume controls. That's it, and OSS4 provides for that. I don't see any advantage at all to go with PulseAudio over OSS4 as default, given the increase in latency. Again, prove me wrong and I'm happy to admit to my ignorance. But right now PulseAudio sounds like yet another soundserver hack, which doesn't help the situation at all... Finally, read this page, it explains my feelings on why OSS4 is the way to go: http://insanecoding.blogspot.com/2007/05/sorry-state-of-s...
Still waiting for Flash
Posted Mar 21, 2008 19:51 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
If you can't figure out why people might want runtime modification of behaviour in ways unanticipated at kernel-build time (!) then there's not much I can do to convince you, although it might help to point out that there are an *awful* lot of people with e.g. service contracts that *forbid* recompiling kernels. (Also, hacking the kernel to add some new feature is a hell of a lot more risky than adding a new plugin, an unprivileged userspace shared library.)
Still waiting for Flash
Posted Mar 23, 2008 12:39 UTC (Sun) by wertigon (guest, #42963) [Link]
I'm questioning why it has to be default. PulseAudio seems to have it's uses, yes, but the way I see it; "Oh crap! We have twenty different incompatible APIs in the Linux sound arena! It's a friggen mess!" "... Darnit! Wait, let's create a twentyfirst incompatible API which can wrap around all other APIs! That'll solve everything!" "... BRILLIANT!!!" ... Isn't that the kind of think that got us into this mess in the first place? Isn't it better to deprecate *ALL* other APIs but three (OSS4, OpenAL and PulseAudio), and take it from there? OSS4 because it's the best API available today for most apps, and is portable to most other UNIXes (sans OSX). OpenAL because it works on Win+MacOSX+Linux, making it the best cross-platform API today. And finally, PulseAudio for those who would need it. It'd solve quite a few headaches on that arena. 'Nuff said.
Still waiting for Flash
Posted Mar 23, 2008 13:21 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Actually the PulseAudio API is going to be superseded, by, wait for it, a twenty-second incompatible API, in the form of the libsydney library, which can talk to all the others! (Note the inspired naming after the city where the design was done: that'll make it easy for people to remember what it is!) The nicest thing about PA for me is that (with the aid of, wait for it, *loadable modules*) it can emulate almost every other sound server and talk to almost every lowlevel API out there. I didn't need to recompile any of my programs when I started using PA: they still think they're talking to esd for the most part, or arts.
Still waiting for Flash
Posted Dec 2, 2008 7:12 UTC (Tue) by netghost (guest, #54048) [Link]
Beside a network sound server is not a rocket science and does not need to be messed up with local, normal audio function.
OSS4 does everything that a normal people requires with minimal configuration, it is portable, easy to program, it is a pity that Linux community seems very good at keeping memories about the unhappy events it has many years ago and can not accept technologies that are apparent superior.
Still waiting for Flash
Posted Mar 11, 2008 22:29 UTC (Tue) by nedrichards (subscriber, #23295) [Link]
The proprietory flash is old and buggy? True last year perhaps but the latest 9.0 v115 release is the same as that for Windows and OS X. I'm not sure how much newer you'd like it to be. As for the buggy bit, well there YMMV a bit more. The core point that it's closed source so it can't be fixed by anyone other than Adobe is a fine one though. I wise Gnash and Swfdec every bit of luck.
Still waiting for Flash
Posted Mar 12, 2008 14:20 UTC (Wed) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link]
And it only works in Gecko-based browsers.
Still waiting for Flash
Posted Mar 13, 2008 14:47 UTC (Thu) by nedrichards (subscriber, #23295) [Link]
I have used it in an Opera 9.5 snapshot. But My Mileage Has Varied so significantly from machine to machine and snapshot to snapshot that I wouldn't recommend it to anyone else.
Still waiting for Flash
Posted Mar 13, 2008 17:16 UTC (Thu) by vmole (guest, #111) [Link]
Every 3rd or 4th Flash video I play in Firefox with Adobe Flash 9.0v115 is silent (or) crashes the browser (or) sucks 100% CPU without doing anything (or) something else. It's not buggy videos, because after restarting firefox the same video will (usually) play fine. So I guess I don't see much different between Adobe Flash and Gnash, except there is hope that Gnash might someday be reliable.
Still waiting for Flash
Posted Mar 14, 2008 3:14 UTC (Fri) by afalko (guest, #37028) [Link]
Proprietary flash has been working extremely well on my boxen for the last year and a half. I honestly haven't stumbled on a major bug with the exception of losing sound in UT2004 after going to a flash website. Full screen on youtube even works, which is pleasantly surprising. One way or another, it does not sit well with me to be using a closed-source app frequently. This article has encouraged me to give Gnash a shot :).
open source alternative to Flash - haXe and NekoVM
Posted Mar 12, 2008 4:48 UTC (Wed) by Shewmaker (guest, #1126) [Link]
I recently became aware of this open source alternative to Flash: haXe and NekoVM. haXe is a language that can target Javascript+DHTML, Flash, or the Neko Virtual Machine. It looks promising.
Just what this reader wanted
Posted Mar 12, 2008 6:12 UTC (Wed) by bignose (subscriber, #40) [Link]
> Some flash games mostly worked, others showed more input-related confusion. Few of them were truly playable. On the other hand, Flash "intros" and advertisements mostly work as intended - just what your editor wanted. I love you, Jon Corbet.
speed
Posted Mar 12, 2008 18:54 UTC (Wed) by DonDiego (guest, #24141) [Link]
So how do Gnash and swfdec compare to Adobe Flash speedwise? My main desktop machine is rather slow for modern day standards and could benefit from a (much) more efficient Flash implementation...
Still waiting for Flash
Posted Mar 12, 2008 19:10 UTC (Wed) by landley (guest, #6789) [Link]
I've found that the acid test for flash is Comedy Central's "Motherload". It's a full-screen flash app that displays video, catalogs episodes of the show you're currently watching (usually The Daily show), you iteract with it to select things and queue up the next episodes for it to show when it's done with this one... And of course they keep changing it. It used to work with the proprietary adobe plugin, but what set of bugs you had changed week by week, then it stopped working at all...
Still waiting for Flash
Posted Mar 12, 2008 21:43 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]
Is there anything it *does* work with, or is it just irredeemably buggy? (i.e., can you distinguish bugs in the flash app from bugs in the flash implementation?)
Still waiting for Flash
Posted Mar 13, 2008 8:27 UTC (Thu) by Los__D (guest, #15263) [Link]
I haven't really had any problems with it, except for the crashes being reported here, and (as a developer) problems with uploads and downloads on secured sites, related to Flash not getting session and HTTP credentials when transferring files (why in the world the player is doing the transfer of files itself, instead of using the browser as it does for all other comm, is beyond me...). Oh, and a few font size differences when using system fonts instead of embedded fonts, but that is almost unavoidable, given the differences in the system's rendering (Which both Windows and Linux sucks at, but that is a completely other subject).
Still waiting for Flash
Posted Mar 12, 2008 22:13 UTC (Wed) by roelofs (guest, #2599) [Link]
Wow, most timely! After last year's (no, wait--two years ago!) article on Linux flash players, not to mention all the intervening security alerts for Adobe's plugin (buffer overflow, arbitrary code execution, arbitrary code execution (2), CRLF injection vulnerability, "a vast number of vulnerabilities") and various positive-sounding user reports in LWN comments in the last year, I was sure I'd be able to get things mostly working for my kids. But Jon's experiences rather closely mirror mine over the past few weeks. My 8-year-old is not a happy camper at the moment, sigh. :-(Greg
Still waiting for Flash
Posted Mar 13, 2008 15:24 UTC (Thu) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link]
A couple of things that might help make Gnash more popular. They may not be realistic though :) 1) Make it either play files successfully or fail cleanly. 2) Campaign to encourage important sites that use flash to test with gnash. The first requires technical skills, but probably less than making gnash work perfectly(!) The second is somewhat dependant on the first, but does not require technical skills.
Still waiting for Flash
Posted Mar 14, 2008 18:17 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link]
2) Campaign to encourage important sites that use flash to test with gnash.
And what would the argument be? That testing (and presumably fixing) sounds expensive. So you'd have to convince the video producer that there are enough people who refuse to use Windows/IE, and buy things advertised on the site, that the advertisers would pay for that testing/fixing. I'm skeptical.
Still waiting for Flash
Posted Mar 20, 2008 14:39 UTC (Thu) by JumpingJack (guest, #51169) [Link]
Someday, people will figure out that closed standards (like Flash) are best avoided. Meanwhile, Flash is a fact of life that we will need to deal with. It appears that we are getting closer to being able to deal with it - but we are not there yet.
Where is the free alternative to Flash, then? The FOSS community, I regret to say, has failed to provide any, and I think that's one of the main reasons why everyone's using Flash - it's there, it just works(tm), and it does what you need.
Of course it's possible (and ideologically pure) to sit on a high horse and wring your hands at people who just want to get stuff done and who are willing to choose a non-free, proprietary solution when no free one exists. But you (the FOSS community) also need to blame yourself: you haven't provided any alternatives, and no amount of consternation is going to change anything. You can sit there and mourn the sad state of the world where people care more about the end results than about using proprietary software, or you can wake up and smell the roses, roll up your sleeves, and implement a free (both as in beer and as in freedom) alternative.
Why do you think Linux is so successful, for example? The reason is that it's a great system, and while the fact that's FOSS certainly also plays a role, a system that was free yet crappy wouldn't enjoy the same success.
So instead of complaining about the fact that people use Flash, give them an alternative. If you build it, they will come.
Still waiting for Flash
Posted Mar 20, 2008 23:04 UTC (Thu) by wertigon (guest, #42963) [Link]
It's been out there for years. It's called SVG + XHTML + JavaScript + CSS. However, few know how this could be put together in a coherent fashion, and there's no dev tool to create an SVG animation that even remotely mirrors the ease-of-use Adobe Flash CS3 gives. And it has a bunch of other problems as well. The pieces are there. Might need a bit work on the rough edges, but until someone genuinely *tries* to create something with it, until support for SVG is available in *all* major browsers (either as a plugin or natively in the browsers) and until there's a killer feature for it, adoption won't happen.
Still waiting for Flash
Posted Mar 21, 2008 15:02 UTC (Fri) by toehser (guest, #16968) [Link]
Well, I'm a fan of the Go-Go genre of Funk from Washington DC. All these bands use Myspace for information, samples, links, updates, etc. The ONLY way I've found to use the Myspace pages I need under Linux is... ... Wine, Windows Firefox, Windows Flash plugin. Except for some of the fonts not "just working", it works pretty well, certainly WAY better than Adobe's Linux plugin, which crashes ALL THE TIME, and gnash or the other one, which just don't work and render garbage. Benefit: I can leave Gnash as the Linux Firefox plugin, and ONLY use the Wine one when I'm trying to use a site that uses much flash...
Still waiting for Flash
Posted Mar 25, 2008 0:30 UTC (Tue) by jhansonxi (guest, #51242) [Link]
Everything works here (Ubuntu Gutsy i386) although I do get some crashes once in a while that may be from Flash (Adblock Plus seems to reduce the frequency). Youtube, the travel site, and the Comedy Central Motherload all work with sound. I'm using Shockwave Flash 9.0 r115 deb file for Hardy because I didn't feel like waiting for bug #173890 to get fixed.