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Comment by easton | Hacker News Reader

Notable changes are that Apple Silicon support is now stable, and that this is the final release of Firefox to support Adobe Flash.

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And if you sorely miss Flash, you can run it with Ruffle:

https://ruffle.rs/

I tried it on archive.org and it’s not that good.

https://archive.org/details/flash_badger

On Chrome the animation starts lagging behind after a few loops so audio and video desync badly. On Firefox it’s much worse, since Firefox is naturally slower than Chrome so even the first loop is desynced already.

I just tried the above animation on W10 + uBo + Firefox 83. I went through 3 loops and it seemed to stay in sync. Then I hopped over to check this comment and came back to that tab, and it was out of sync at that time. So I think Tab Switching might be a challenge for Ruffle.

Clearly Ruffle is not perfect, but leagues, furlongs ahead of having to watch old flash content on YouTube via Unregistered Hypercam 2.

IIRC (it's been many years) after many loops that animation started desyncing in the real Flash player too. It wasn't terribly noticeable after only a few loops, but the fact that it happened made me think that the audio loop was completely async from the animation.

Didn't not experience this on Chromium/MacOS Big Sur/MBP.

In fact it ran perfectly.

I will have to keep that in mind. A lot of old management interfaces for rack-mount servers run flash for their web interface :S

Poor, poor `seink2`.

That sounds interesting, can you please elaborate on the whys and hows?

I have a Cisco R200 server. It has a built in management interface called CIMC. (There is a proper name for that management type software but I can't remember.

From these panels, you can pretty much do anything you want to the physical server - Open a console session, change boot order, bios, etc.

Screenshot: https://imgur.com/iWYJIpU

I had no idea they even still supported Flash?! I thought they changed their plugin API so many times that it would have been unsupported many years ago.

Major browsers can't ditch Flash until Adobe EOLs it. Too many legacy enterprise apps still rely on it, even though they are likely being frantically reimplemented this month. I'm in that boat.

Depreciation in Firefox isn't going to cause that much corporate pressure to finally rewrite those ancient flash apps. When Internet Explorer drops it then they have a problem.

According to adobe the plugin will stop loading content in January regardless of the browser

If IE and Windows are running the extension then I guess IE can tell it the date is anything it wants?

Hopefully adobe was smart enough to prevent that

Microsoft seems to have mostly abandoned IE so hopefully it won't come to that.

> Major browsers can't ditch Flash until Adobe EOLs it.

Adobe announced EOL a long time ago. January 12th is the day it will stop working, regardless of browser support.

A website my kids school use for maths advises it will stop worrying except for with Google Chrome, so I assume Google is keeping their flash implementation, and so flash will keep working.

My wife's school is in the same boat except they've been told they are SOL and they need to find replacements.

That web site is wrong. The Flash player in Chrome will stop working on January 1st, and it will be removed from the browser entirely in an update early next year.

https://www.chromium.org/flash-roadmap

https://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/end-of-life.html

Enterprises that still rely on legacy Flash apps can pay Adobe partner Harman for a custom standalone Flash host application:

https://services.harman.com/partners/adobe

Adobe, Mozilla, Google, Microsoft, and Apple simultaneously announced back in 2017 that Flash would no longer be supported after 2020:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Plugins/Roadmap#See...

The extension API changed (web extensions). The plugin API is still NPAPI. There was a project to replace the API with the one that chrome uses, which has better sandboxing, but eventually they abandoned that project.

My memory may be faulty, but my recollection is there was never a serious attempt to replace NPAPI with Pepper. It was looked into, but it was concluded that the Pepper APIs were too tightly bound to Webkit's implementation to make it possible to implement, and Mozilla instead built their own out-of-process sandbox (which was sorely needed because Flash crashes were the single largest cause of Firefox crashes).

This is the project I was referring to: https://wiki.mozilla.org/index.php?title=Mortar_Project&oldi...

Chrome has deprecated Pepper, hasn't it?

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