Hacker News Reader

Comment by bwarp | Hacker News Reader

I get the feeling this isn't going to be that much of a problem. I've not got the flash plugin installed in Firefox and I'm not finding any great hardship these days.

Perhaps it'll kill Flash a bit quicker considering the amount of Kiosks and Internet cafes running Firefox+Flash on Linux.

View on HN

>I'm not finding any great hardship these days.

You must not watch many videos in your browsers then outside the odd one on Youtube. The reality out there is that Flash is still the main choice for delivering video. Flash is a necessary evil. It may be dying but for many it's still necessary and its removal from Firefox removes significant usability for its users.

I watch plenty of videos and I've never had a problem with the big streaming sites delivering h264 versions. The only flash videos I still encounter are on older, lightly, maintained sites or sites that just download flv files.

And if iPad sales are any indication I don't think it's as big a deal as you make it out to be.

The iPad includes H264 support, as does Chrome. Firefox doesn't (and neither does Chromium, does it?). So this does screw anyone over who wants to watch H264, which really is the majority of video on the web.

nobody wany yo watch h264, they want to watch video, its up to the site to accomodate them

Yeah right, websites really care for the Linux user on Firefox and are willing to go to extra lengths to accommodate him.

People won't serve you HTML 5 video unless you impersonate a mobile device. It's still a problem if you don't want to change your user-agent every time you visit a website and just cross your fingers that they think you're mobile and therefore serve up HTML 5 (and as others have pointed out, often in a format that non-Chrome won't play anyway).

youtube.com/html5

Right, YT is one among a handful of exceptions that serve HTML 5 to a desktop browser. That doesn't really change the general argument -- almost all sites are not going to give HTML 5 video as an option to desktop clients.

I didn't realize anybody used other sites for video :)

They somewhat appear to want to: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2012/02/21/apple-google-col...

I don't think this is "Fuck Google" so much as it is "Fuck people uploading stuff through this interface."

If I write some software that costs $999 and only works on HP/UX, it's not "Fuck Microsoft" or "Fuck Apple". It's "Fuck me."

I think they call it cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Not really. I prefer written words as the content is easier to scan through. Video is almost laborious watching.

I run ArchLinux, use Chrome, and have the flashplugin-prelease installed. This is version 10.0 of Flash. Because this plugin is out of date Chrome will disable flash on all websites I visited that use Flash. It would then show a little bar at the top indicating that my flash plugin is out of date and therefore disabled. If I wanted to run Flash anyway it gave me the option to run it for the current page. I noticed that I rarely ever want to run flash unless i'm specifically visiting a youtube link. I really think this "Run Flash for current page" functionality should be the default though. I like having the option of turning on flash only when i absolutely want it. If I just keep running the older versions of Flash I can continue getting this desired functionality.

There's no reason to run an out of date flash plugin. You can enable click-to-play for flash in the chrome settings. It's in the content settings area of the "under the hood" section I believe.

Confirmed (for Chromium 7.0.963.56 on Arch, w/ up-to-date Flash)

Click-to-play isn't friendly to music streaming services which use 1px flash player for their music.

Flashblock plugins are ridiculous by requiring you to blacklist or whitelist flash domain instead of web domain. The former happens to be on CDN and suddently you can't do it :(

The real reason it'll not be much of a problem is that the current Flash 11.2 plugins won't spontaneously disappear when the next version gets released. Indeed they'll have 5 more years of security updates.

So the only thing non-Chrome-using Linux users will miss out on are things that use the new features of Flash introduced after that date.

That makes sense. I was starting to wonder if this was the end of flash for Mozilla on major websites like YouTube, but 5 years is a really long time for support. Hopefully, we'll see an emergence of widespread html5 use by then and not have to worry about having proprietary web technologies working.

This might be more of a problem for FreeBSD than it is for Linux; at the moment, one can use flash on FreeBSD via linux firefox and hackery. I'm not aware of a way to use linux chrome as yet.

Check out FlashVideoReplacer [1]. It replaces videos with your browser media plugin or can launch it in a separate player. I use it with gecko-mediaplayer and love it!

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/flashvideorep...

You still be able to use flash 11.2 and receive security updates for another 5 years. Unless there is going to be massive progress for flash (which we already know there isn't) this isn't really news. They are basically saying if there ever is a flash 12 it will not be supported on linux.

That hasn't been true for a very long time. Just using the linux flash plugin with nspluginwrapper on a native firefox has been the preferred method for flash on FreeBSD for several years now. I have not yet tried to use the linux chrome plugin with a native chromium, but that may also be a possibility now or sometime in the future.

Or just maybe any improvement makes Flash usable on Linux without crashing the browser. People might actually start enabling Flash on Linux if that happens.

I'll give you that. It's one of the reasons I don't have the flash plugin installed.

I don't find Flash crashing my browser on Linux too often, but it crashes itself pretty regularly.

Plus the older hardware I run Linux on can barely show a 288p Hulu video, with lots of stuttering, even though the machine can play videos twice that resolution flawlessly in any of the native video players.

>I don't find Flash crashing my browser on Linux too often, but it crashes itself pretty regularly.

Before recentish versions of Firefox, a Flash crash would bring down the whole browser.

I've used Chrome since it was available for Linux and I've never once had Flash take down the entire browser. In fact, I can't say I've ever had a Flash crash at all in Chrome. Funny enough it crashes rather frequently in Firefox (still doesn't crash the browser itself though...)

Right, it's obviously dependent on a lot of factors. Apple wouldn't even support it on the Iphone. For general users it may work well enough with the right environement, but I use Linux for development and I have little use for Flash compared to the relatively big impact that it has on system resources.

Here, Gnash already works fine when I really need Flash, which isn't often.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com