Hacker News Reader

Comment by gcp | Hacker News Reader

I can't make much sense of this. Adobe declared Flash dead. Apple declared Flash dead. Google declared Flash dead in Chrome for Android.

Now, they're going to continue working on Flash, but only on a new API that is implemented only in a single browser in Linux (and from statements from Apple and Mozilla, will stay that way), but keeping it compatible with the old NPAPI on Windows?

What I don't even....

Edit: Could it be that Google is planning to release (or has released) some Linux-based appliance where Flash support is a must?

View on HN

Adobe never declared desktop Flash dead, they're just hedging their bets with HTML5 tools.

Isn't Chromebook essentially a Linux-based appliance?

Yes, by my understanding. And much closer to "mainstream" Linux kernel-wise than Android. What stack of software they have running atop of that (i.e. between it and Chrome) I can't remember off the top of my head.

Where does Adobe declare Flash on the desktop dead?

In the same place where they declare mobile (a bit of a misnomer, tablets aren't exactly mobile, not much more than notebooks anyway) Flash dead.

Flash is appealing because it has features HTML/CSS/JS do not have and because everyone on every platform has it. Since mobile devices are becoming ever more important and Flash is not supported on those devices (or will not be) the second part of that sentence is no longer true.

Conclusion: Flash is dead. We will have to deal with it for years but it's on its way out. A web technology that will not work on mobile devices has no future.

I may agree, but you didn't show where _Adobe_ states this for the _desktop_ ...

If you were on Wikipedia you'd see a [Citation needed] here.

They never did that. They declared the Flash Player for mobile dead. but it's still very viable to make Flash applications for mobile, using AIR.

That's Adobes biggest problem, for so many people "Flash" means "browser plugin." They need to kill that notion, the Flash Player is just a part of the Flash platform.

Which isn’t part of the web.

Flash may well survive as AIR - that’s an uphill battle but it's possible – but that’s kinda irrelevant for the web.

They are basically saying due to Pepper there is no or little work in getting flash to work in Chrome on Linux... so there will be continued support.

The real question is if this is true, why are they dropping flash for android?

Probably because Native Client on ARM isn't as well-developed.

http://www.chromium.org/nativeclient/reference/arm-overview#...

There are definitely other reasons. Remember "Thoughts on Flash" [1]?

“First, there’s Open… Rather than use Flash, Apple has adopted HTML5…” — and CSS3, SVG, and HTML5 have indeed provided most of the capabilities that once were Flash’s domain.

“Third, there’s reliability, security and performance.” — which is really three things, each of which Flash has an outstandingly poor track record with.

“Fourth, there’s battery life.”

“Fifth, there’s Touch. ¶ Flash was designed for PCs using mice, not for touch screens using fingers. For example, many Flash websites rely on ‘rollovers’…”

[1]: http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

No. Just that Google will do it for them in Chrome. That's what they already do anyway because of the security hole that Flash is.

Where'd you pull that idea out of? Google's not implementing the Flash player, only providing new API for the Flash engineers to build against, the same as they always have.

From previous statements and actions of Google regarding Flash (fixing security holes in a way that implies they have source code access), it is very likely that it is indeed Google that are doing this.

Flash has been given some life on mobile via http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3623319

  > Google declared Flash dead in Chrome for Android.

I'm not part of Google, but i have been studying Native Client pretty closely. I think Google's interest here is that Native Client is designed from the ground up for security. They are happy for Flash to operate through Native Client (which is what the "Pepper" API interfaces), because that largely obviates the security issues it poses.

This is excellent news for web security. It will force other browsers to at least implement the Pepper API. Hopefully it will encourage them to use Native Client as well.

"Other browsers" have already commented why things like Native Client are absolutely a no-go area. As far as I can tell, the arguments against Pepper run much along the same lines - being dependent on Native Client sure won't help.

If you see the arguments against Native Client, it's also obvious using it to be able to keep supporting Flash would be rather...ironic.

What are the arguments against NaCl?

You made sense until the last 2 sentences.

You're saying Google is enforcing whatever it wishes upon others. Aka, non-standard stuff.

The Pepper API would be all nice if it wasn't hiding the NaCl vessel. NaCl is a very hard to standardize (yes, being open source has nothing to do with ease of implementation, or proper standards. News at 11.). NaCl is also (one of) the vessel for Google to get more control over the web, due to the above, and that it can do stuff such as "take your C/C#/etc. app and run in it Chrome, via Chrome market!", while they know others can hardly ever implement it.

you can be relatively sure that Google pushed Adobe a little bit in that direction, and that eventually flash may be Pepper API only. Its easier for Adobe too.

The Native Client source code repository is huge, but it is not that hard to find your way around in. I have been studying it because I plan to build something on top of it. I am by no means a stellar programmer, and I have found it reasonably navigable. (It did take me a few days to get my bearings, though, and I plan to use a much simpler, custom API to minimize the application's attack surface. Haven't looked much at Pepper.)

yes - but implement it in opera, ie, or firefox - you'll find that you've to rearchitecture a lot of your browser - or might as well just grab webkit (of course, in our case you can just try firefox since its the only open source one of the 3)

I must admit, I hadn't thought about the changes necessary in the browser. What major rearrangements does it require?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com