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Comment by stanley | Hacker News Reader

Iron works great but has issues with Flash (Ubuntu 9.10 x64).

Can anyone confirm if Linux Chrome plays well with Flash?

For the past ~2 months or so, Linux Chrome has worked really well with flash -- as good or better than Firefox. They seem to be running a windows version of flash -- or at least the few times flash has run into an endless loop and I have to kill it via top, the process name is "exe".

Update: Flash still doesn't work perfectly -- as my trip to scribd just proved. For times like this, I just reopen the page in Firefox.

That explains a lot! I wondered how Chrome OS got the Linux build of Flash working without X11. I thought they might have a thin X11 lib in their window manager, but I guess they shoe-horned the Windows build into the Linux version of Chrome. Crafty.

Chrome OS uses X11. The idea that Chrome is running Windows Flash Player under some kind of Wine wrapper is ridiculous IMO.

But the name contains the string .exe! Clearly that means Windows is being emulated.

(Note to people that think this is true; install f-spot on Linux some time. It's a C# application, and ends in .exe. Even though it has nothing to do with Windows, except that Microsoft spec'd C# and Microsoft makes Windows...)

So does all mono compiled applications for unix/mac. It's just an extension. It might be what you have said, but unless verified. It isn't.

Picasa for example is emulated through wine on Linux/Mac, but that's because it was developed originally for Win32.

It's not correct to say that Picasa is emulated using wine. Instead, it's a native Linux app that has been ported using WineLib, which reimplements a lot of the Windows API, but compiled to Linux. Instead of replacing API calls with the Linux equivalents, there's just an additional layer that redirect calls or implements them.

Wine and WineLib are different things.

Even though this is not true in this case, this wouldn't be unheard of. Google did exactly the same with Picasa, that is, the Linux port of Picasa is a modified version of the original Windows Picasa running on Wine. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picasa#Linux

My mistake. I wrongly assumed Chrome OS did not include X11 when I read that they used a new window system.

ChromeOS is written on top of Clutter, which uses OpenGL via X11.

The process name is exe because chrome internally runs /proc/self/exe when launching the thread for flash.

I've been running daily builds of Chrome and Chromium without flash issues. I don't update regularly though. My 'daily builds' are probably 1.5-2 months old. I'm on Ubuntu 9.04 32-bit though.

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