Chrome 20 Takes Over Adobe Flash On Linux | Hacker News Reader

Chrome 20 Takes Over Adobe Flash On Linux

phoronix.com

79 pointsmdesantis57 comments

This is good news for Flash, but it does make me sad. Not because it means Flash will continue to be around, but because I really don't like Chrome on Linux.

Don't get me wrong, I love Chrome. I use it on Windows all the time. But Linux has this little niggle I can't stand with default browser behavior: Firefox calls it "browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll". And Firefox allows you to change that to true or false.

I'm not often changing small bits of a URL; when I click the URL bar it's for the specific intent of removing what is there and replacing it with something completely different. I understand the arguments for both use cases. Firefox does as well. The Chrome developers don't. In searching their bug tracker, you find the Chrome guys don't consider this a bug [1] (it's really not) but worse yet, don't plan on having the option to change this behavior. That's poor customer service, and inconsistent with Chrome on Windows. When I switch between OSes as often as I do, the last thing I want to worry about is how my browser will behave on this machine vs that one.

So now if/when I want to use Flash, I have to switch from Firefox to Chrome. When I'm done using Flash, I have to switch back. Google, please... please don't tell me about your keyboard shortcuts, don't tell me to click three times, don't tell me to click and drag... if you're making me use your browser, let me use it the way I want to. The way it works on Windows or even in Firefox.

[1] https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=26140

A bit beside the point but why don't you just use alt+d ?

It will perhaps feel a bit weird at first if you're used to go to the address-bar with the mouse but really, since you are going to type an address you are still going to use the keyboard anyway.

Keybindings are weird animals. I've always used Ctrl-L for that, which focuses the URL bar and selects it. I note that Alt-D will not remove focus from an existing text widget, so it doesn't work as reliably. Where does Alt-D come from? I guess it's a vestige of an earlier browser?

Also, as the OP is using a mouse action, it's worth pointing out that triple-clicking the URL does a select-all (by analogy to selecting the whole "line" in other apps).

>>Where does Alt-D come from?

Internet Explorer.

If I remember correctly, Phoenix (firefox) was the first browser to support that keybinding. The lack of support for this shortcut in Netscape/Mozilla was one of the reasons I struggled to switch away from IE back in the day. Really hated Ctrl+L as it required two hands (OK, you need two hands to type out the URL, but I was used to Alt+D dammit! :)

It is the shortcut on the first 'd' in "Address", or "A&ddress" for any WIN32 developers out there.

Bingo, that's the archaeology I was looking for. Thanks!

In the bug tracker discussion, they mentioned keyboard shortcuts. In my post, I mentioned I didn't want to use them. My hand is on the mouse to navigate the page, it's on the mouse to get to the URL bar, and it's on the mouse to click it. Often times I can type the URL with three fingers and three keys via muscle memory, then click the result when it pops up. That takes one hand on the keyboard, and no concentration.

Chrome on Linux is the only browser that breaks this. Instead of me having to change how I browse in every browser, why doesn't Google simply add the option to change like Firefox does?

I often do the same. I type the beginning of a URL and use the mouse to finish it off, that's why I love ald+d because I can hit it with my left hand alone (and don't need to bother the right hand that's on the mouse).

There is a balance of having everything customizable and forcing the users to adapt. In this case both Mozilla and Google have made the same call, they feel that this is how it is supposed to be on Linux - I don't think we can blame them for that.

Firefox has always been about customizability while chrome has always been about simplicity, you just don't have that level of detail of customizability in Chrome - for good or worse, that's why. If anything I'd be surprised if they did present this as an option (for every option they do get wrong that sucks but they have been doing a remarkably good job overall (in my opinion), but I'm with you on this one).

Do not try and bend the spoon. That is impossible. Instead, only try and realize the truth - there is no spoon. Then you will see it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.

Eg - when you can't adapt the world to yourself, adapt yourself to the world. Don't get emotionally affected by every little annoyance in the world and especially technology, that way madness lies.

Eg - pick a workaround, go with it, habitualize it, then move on. Personally I like click address bar, then almost simultaneously CTRL+a. tjoff's ALT-d is awesome too, didn't know about that one.

Don't get emotionally affected by every little annoyance in the world and especially technology, that way madness lies.

Madness, but occasionally madness and change. The OP and his angry cohort are trading their collective sanity for thousands of mostly invisible minor improvements that make the world a better place.

I mainly use Chrome on Mac, but also hate this behavior. Yes, clicking on an insertion point, cussing, and using Ctrl-A works if I want to select the beginning of the URL, but if I wanted to do this I would have stuck with the keyboard and not bothered carefully selecting my insertion point.

Rage on OP!

Double-clicking also selects the entire address bar.

You should learn to code.

Doesn't... double clicking the URL bar solve this problem?

please don't tell me about your keyboard shortcuts, don't tell me to click three times, don't tell me to click and drag... if you're making me use your browser, let me use it the way I want to.

The problem is it's inconsistent with other platforms.

No, the problem is that Google Chrome in Linux treats the textbox the same way the textbox is treated every, other, place in Linux. Browsers in Windows are the only place that this behavior is exhibited. It's the exception behavior.

That's like saying "Chrome uses metacity instead of the OS X window decorations".

If it makes you feel any better, I'd like to be able to override the platform default so that single clicking in Chrome at work doesn't select all of the text.

I usually select all by clicking and dragging upwards a bit. Works on OS X at least.

This is exactly why relying on plugins and closed-source components for the web is dangerous. Adobe can just decide to stop supporting a platform (Linux), and only companies partnering with Adobe (Google) get to keep using Flash.

Does that include a fix for the smurf bug?

https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3109467

Unfortunatelly, the last and final release of Adobe Flash for Linux has a bug, which shuffles the colors in Youtube videos. So far it seemed they never fix that.

You can fix that by disabling hardware acceleration.

Right click on a flash element -> settings -> untick

Took me 3 months of hallucinogenic youtube videos for me to discover that.

What will happen to Flash on the Ubuntu LTS releases? Will it be automatically removed at some point?

Adobe is still providing bugfix versions of the 11.2 tree for NPAPI linux.

Phoronix is currently down, but there wasn't much to this story to begin with:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.pho...

Google's Chrome web-browser reached version 20 yesterday and for Linux users this marks the point that the web company has taken over Flash Player support on Linux from Adobe using its PPAPI implementation.

As shared back in February, Adobe is abandoning support for Flash Player on Linux. However, they are allowing Google to continue the Flash Linux support via a PPAPI (Pepper) plug-in, which right now is a plug-in API only implemented by the Chrome/Chromium web-browser.

In March Adobe pushed out the last major Linux update meanwhile today with Chrome 20 we have the Google-maintained Flash by default for Linux x86 and x86_64 users.

The Google Chrome 20 release announcement can be found on their blog, but it's not too exciting. Aside from supporting the new Flash implementation for Linux users, there's bug-fixes and the usual round of other enhancements.

Crossing my fingers that Chromium will stop finally yelling at me about my outdated* Flash.

*While providing a helpful link to solutions that don't work.

Yes, it stops moaning and groaning about that in v20.

On a side note, Google Chrome/Chromium's at version 20 already?

Welcome to the infinite version.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-infinite-versio...

I'm actually looking forward to running a v100 piece of software. I don't think I've ever seen software reach that monumental milestone, although I expect I will next year.

I wonder whether Firefox or Chrome will win the race.

For what its worth, I have an Nvidia card and am running Ubuntu 12.04: Chrome's Flash plugin does not work very well on the latest dev build; it has some weird issue with playing flash at double speed or something. I had to switch back to Adobe's flash plugin until this issue is resolved... This could potentially be hardware specific in my case, but, just wanted to let others know that Adobe's plugin still works.

I had that same problem start occuring too, after a recent update. 12.04 x64, but with Intel HD3000 and no discrete GPU. However, a subsequent update seems to have fixed it, it's gone now.

I've experienced the same issues. Some sites, like Udacity, is borderline broken for me. I applaud the effort to move off the Adobe plugin, but it's important to remember that to the end user, we just really care about how well it works. In the meantime, I've gone back to using Firefox.

Google is so invested in Flash at this point. Why don't they just take over/buy "Flash" with it's engineers from Adobe? Probably hard to separate them from the Air team and all the other "products" from Adobe.

Are they really? I'd say they are far more invested in WebKit, HTML5 and Java.

The only things I can think of are Flash in YouTube provides far more control over playback for things like downloading, ad delivery etc.

But fundamentally... Street View. I can't see how that will be delivered with high performance by HTML5 any time soon.

WebGL or perhaps fiddling with Canvas. It's only a matter of time.

It doesn't seem that unlikely, street view is mostly a fancy slideshow.

It does some pretty sweet 3d-aware image manipulation. I wouldn't call that a slide show.

On the client end?

Yes.

Street View already works in the WebGL version of Google Maps, with performance no worse than the Flash version.

Then I retract my half-hearted defense that perhaps Google is invested in Flash.

Which is why they're furiously working on MediaSource API (and it's been in Chrome for a while for those who pay attention to their about:flags)

Does this mean Flash is being executed in the native client sandbox as well? If so, hooray! (and can we enable this on other platforms)?

No. Adobe has stopped supporting Flash for Linux. Google has announced that they continue to maintain Flash for Linux, but only for Chrome. Google has been bundling Flash with Chrome for a while, so this announcement is simply that Google won't stop doing what they've already been doing.

For one happy moment i was expecting a working open source implementation. Then i crashed on the ground...

I played yesterday with some SVG demos again and with Raphael JS library. We need to invest more efforts into open source technology instead of trying to patch existing proprietary and inefficient solution.

what is this news? can somebody read and try to explain me/all what exactly is happening here?

iirc Adobe has dropped NPAPI support for browsers on Linux, leaving Chrome on Linux as the only browser that support the new PPAPI interface.

So if you want to use new versions of Flash on Linux, you have to use Chrome.

Obviously Chromium supports PPAPI too, but as far as I can tell the PPAPI version of Flash isn't available for it so the official Google-branded Chrome releases really are the only option for Flash on Linux.

The only option to get newer versions of the Adobe plugin. The 11.2 branch will get security updates into 2017 (2012-03-27 + 5 years): https://blogs.adobe.com/flashplayer/2012/02/adobe-and-google...

You can use the PPAPI versions with Chromium if you want to. You just need to extract the so file from chrome package and use it for Chromium. There are readymade packages available in AUR for instance. Of course your point stands that officially Chrome is the only option left.

Hopefully this will lead other browser makers to integrate Native Client as well which would lead to a world free of browser-plugins!

Native Client Flash isn't available for Chromium, which obviously implements NaCl, so I don't see why other browser makes implementing NaCl would let them use NaCl Flash.

PPAPI flash works in Chromium, scan this thread (unless that was your point). It's just that the fully open-source browsers aren't interested in setting up a distribution channel for it.

There is no such thing as Native Client Flash. PPAPI ("Pepper") is a replacement of the venerable NPAPI plugin API.

> Hopefully this will lead other browser makers to integrate Native Client as well which would lead to a world free of browser-plugins!

That is self-contradictory. Native Client is a browser plugin (it uses the PPAPI browser plugin interface).

still native client is open source and could easily be integrated into every brother, just like chrome does it. This would eliminate the need for every other plugin.

> still native client is open source and could easily be integrated into every brother, just like chrome does it. This would eliminate the need for every other plugin.

First of all, being open source doesn't mean it is easy to integrate, either technically or otherwise (by otherwise, I mean that other browser makers have principles that determine what technology makes sense to put in their browser, and NaCl does not necessarily pass them).

Second, how would this eliminate the need for every other plugin? Chrome has NaCl but it still has Flash.

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