ADOBE Flash EOL start of 2021
Recently a friend of mine asked me a question: "I just got a message that ADOBE Flash is no longer available free of charge in 2021. Does the Ubuntu system have any equivalent Flash Player so that I can continue to watch videos on Facebook etc?" In order to answer the question my friend just raised, I did a bit of research and digging around, and found that the ADOBE Flash contents and flash player issues are bigger than I initially thought ... It's really a BIG DEAL!!! I myself have a little bit of a deja vu feeling - bringing back some Y2K memories ... 8-) Well, when the Year 2021 starts, it's not so much that we can't use Adobe Flash Player free of charge, but that Flash Player will no longer be able to play ANY Flash contents, PERIOD!!! In technical terms, Flash Player (in ALL OS's) is officially entering "End-of-Life" (EOL). Below is a FAQ from Adobe Official website about this matter: https://www.adobe.com/sea/products/flashplayer/end-of-life.html If you google the web, there are no doubt tons of materials explaining & discussing this hot topic! I came across this site, which I find providing a clear enough explanation, and in an easy to understand approach to this issue. Sharing it here: https://turbofuture.com/computers/The-End-of-Flash-in-2020-Converting-From-F... In a nutshell, contents created with this Adobe Flash technology, and the Flash Player that is used to play them - are no longer suitable in a Mobile-centric world of ours today. In fact, with so many security issues & vulnerabilities popping up over the years, and with one after another mainstream web browsers, device makers as well as content creators abandoning Flash in droves, most could see the writing on the wall long ago ... For people who are relying heavily on social media like Facebook, WhatsApp, Youtube, etc, with substantial amounts of contents already in Flash - not to fear! The big players in this field have started making all the necessary changes to transition towards replacing technologies like HTML5, etc, long ago. Below is one such FAQ's from FB: https://www.facebook.com/fbgaminghome/blog/flash-end-of-life-approaching-opt... However, no doubt there will be individuals or small-time content creators out there who may find such efforts to migrate from Flash to HTML5 daunting. If you have content like online courses, apps and other learning assets built in or published in Flash, as of 2021, any flash content (either built in or published as Flash) may no longer work. Not to fear too! There are plenty of resources out there (especially on the Web), to make such transition less stressful. Feel free to share your opinions on this issue here ... Would very much like to hear comments about this (like, any implication to FOSS, etc) - from the FOSS Community's perspective. Regards, Wen
On 12/27/20 9:11 AM, Wen Lin via luv-talk wrote:
Feel free to share your opinions on this issue here ... Would very much like to hear comments about this (like, any implication to FOSS, etc) - from the FOSS Community's perspective.
This may be of interest: https://www.infoq.com/news/2020/07/webassembly-flash-eol-legacy/
Wen Lin via luv-talk <luv-talk@luv.asn.au> writes:
Feel free to share your opinions on this issue here ... Would very much like to hear comments about this (like, any implication to FOSS, etc) - from the FOSS Community's perspective.
I have found that websites that rely on flash are already completely broken, and not just from Linux. Two examples come to mind: * During home schooling a teacher set exercises from a flash based website that the kids could not access. Although presumably this still worked for the teacher. * The (incredibly dodgy) Swann based dvr hardware has a built in webserver that comes up with an error that looks like it might(?) be flash related: "This plugin does not support this browser. Please use the following browser: 1. Internet Explorer 8 and above. 2. Firefox 51 and below. 3. Google Chrome 44 or lower." My generally feeling is that any websites that still require flash are probably not actively maintained anymore, likely to be buggy and have security flaws, and should not be used. -- Brian May <brian@linuxpenguins.xyz> https://linuxpenguins.xyz/brian/
On 12/27/20 6:12 PM, Brian May via luv-talk wrote:
My generally feeling is that any websites that still require flash are probably not actively maintained anymore, likely to be buggy and have security flaws, and should not be used. Also, to the best of my knowledge, the APIs that were supposed to make Flash content more accessible to people with disabilities weren't widely used. So, much Flash content probably excludes people by design. I won't miss it.
Quoting Wen Lin (vwenlin@gmail.com):
Feel free to share your opinions on this issue here ... Would very much like to hear comments about this (like, any implication to FOSS, etc) - from the FOSS Community's perspective.
You-collective can thank, to a significant degree, my wife Deirdre for the demise of Macromedia^W Adobe Flash -- in the sense that she was working as an engineer at Apple, Inc. in the 2000s on the Apple Safari Web browser team, among other things documenting in fine detail the large percentages of alleged safari crashes and bugs that were actually caused by the Adobe Systems Flash plug-in on OSX and iOS. The material she provided went straight to CEO Steve Jobs, who relied on it heavily in his April 2010 open letter "Thoughts on Flash", where Jobs outlined reasons why Flash would be banned on Apple iOS platforms: crashes, short battery life, poor security, poor support for mobile devices with touch support, and other problems. https://web.archive.org/web/20200430094807/https://www.apple.com/hotnews/tho... That was the end of Flash on iOS, and the beginning of the end of the stuff everywhere. H.264/AVC (and to a limited degree Theora and WebM/VP8) and HTML5 did the rest. There remains the problem of making sure existing Flash games and Flash artwork/animations continue to be usable. Apparently, there are solutions, sometimes (as your link suggests) involving conversion to HTML5, but not always: https://hyperallergic.com/609682/rip-adobe-flash-five-takeaways-about-the-pl... https://kotaku.com/with-flash-games-on-the-chopping-block-one-popular-sit-18... Meanwhile, the fact that Adobe Systems's Flash/Shockwave interpreter has a kill switch gets added to the existing damning reasons why nobody should have relied on it, and why we should be on balance glad it's getting killed. There have been open source independent Flash re-implementations -- Lightspark and GNU Gnash among them. All have needed to guess at the spec details, since it is proprietary, and therefore of necessity are partial solutions. Personally, I've never bothered. -- Cheers, "Like looking both ways before crossing the street, and Rick Moen then getting hit by a submarine." -- Clarke Smith, age 9, rick@linuxmafia.com winner of Washtington Post's contest for best description McQ! (4x80) of the year 2020 in a single word or phrase.
You-collective can thank, to a significant degree, my wife Deirdre for the demise of Macromedia^W Adobe Flash -- in the sense that she was working as an engineer at Apple, Inc. in the 2000s on the Apple Safari Web browser team ... The material she provided went straight to CEO Steve Jobs, who relied on it heavily in his April 2010 open letter "Thoughts on Flash"
That's really a very significant piece of history there, Rick! Thanks for sharing.
There remains the problem of making sure existing Flash games and Flash artwork/animations continue to be usable. . . . . . . and why we should be on balance glad it's getting killed.
Yeah, I'm certain most people would not mourn the demise of Flash! I for one is also glad to see the back of it. However, I'm old enough to know that, over the decades, there have been a HUGE amount of contents, like online courses, apps and other learning assets (and of course, some cat videos) built in or published in Flash. My worry is, for some of the very old resource sites that no one is maintaining anymore (or do not have the resources to fix the contents), does this mean some of the contents out there, despite their historical value, may be inaccessible by future generations? I suppose this is one example where the demise of a once-popular proprietary format is leading to the loss of some of humanity's historical records ... Regards, Wen On Mon, Dec 28, 2020 at 1:06 PM Rick Moen via luv-talk <luv-talk@luv.asn.au> wrote:
Quoting Wen Lin (vwenlin@gmail.com):
Feel free to share your opinions on this issue here ... Would very much like to hear comments about this (like, any implication to FOSS, etc) - from the FOSS Community's perspective.
You-collective can thank, to a significant degree, my wife Deirdre for the demise of Macromedia^W Adobe Flash -- in the sense that she was working as an engineer at Apple, Inc. in the 2000s on the Apple Safari Web browser team, among other things documenting in fine detail the large percentages of alleged safari crashes and bugs that were actually caused by the Adobe Systems Flash plug-in on OSX and iOS. The material she provided went straight to CEO Steve Jobs, who relied on it heavily in his April 2010 open letter "Thoughts on Flash", where Jobs outlined reasons why Flash would be banned on Apple iOS platforms: crashes, short battery life, poor security, poor support for mobile devices with touch support, and other problems.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200430094807/https://www.apple.com/hotnews/tho...
That was the end of Flash on iOS, and the beginning of the end of the stuff everywhere. H.264/AVC (and to a limited degree Theora and WebM/VP8) and HTML5 did the rest.
There remains the problem of making sure existing Flash games and Flash artwork/animations continue to be usable. Apparently, there are solutions, sometimes (as your link suggests) involving conversion to HTML5, but not always:
https://hyperallergic.com/609682/rip-adobe-flash-five-takeaways-about-the-pl...
https://kotaku.com/with-flash-games-on-the-chopping-block-one-popular-sit-18...
Meanwhile, the fact that Adobe Systems's Flash/Shockwave interpreter has a kill switch gets added to the existing damning reasons why nobody should have relied on it, and why we should be on balance glad it's getting killed.
There have been open source independent Flash re-implementations -- Lightspark and GNU Gnash among them. All have needed to guess at the spec details, since it is proprietary, and therefore of necessity are partial solutions. Personally, I've never bothered.
-- Cheers, "Like looking both ways before crossing the street, and Rick Moen then getting hit by a submarine." -- Clarke Smith, age 9, rick@linuxmafia.com winner of Washtington Post's contest for best description McQ! (4x80) of the year 2020 in a single word or phrase. _______________________________________________ luv-talk mailing list luv-talk@luv.asn.au https://lists.luv.asn.au/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/luv-talk
On 12/28/20 3:01 AM, Wen Lin via luv-talk wrote:
I suppose this is one example where the demise of a once-popular proprietary format is leading to the loss of some of humanity's historical records ...
The Web Assembly implementations of Flash should alleviate this problem to some degree. It's also a more generl problem of proprietary formats. Although most of my writing is in Markdown or LaTeX, there are some documents that (for reasons outside my control) were converted to Microsoft Word format along the way. My approach with storing those locally is to import them into LibreOffice, then export in the flat XML version of ODF, then commit the resulting file to the Git repository. I hope that's good enough for preservation. Of course, we can argue about whether Microsoft Word format is proprietary or not, given OOXML and Microsoft's relationship with the ISO.
Wen Lin via luv-talk wrote:
Recently a friend of mine asked me a question: "I just got a message that ADOBE Flash is no longer available free of charge in 2021. Does the Ubuntu system have any equivalent Flash Player so that I can continue to watch videos on Facebook etc?"
[history brain-dump follows] Last time I looked, Google (not Adobe) had 100% responsibility of ongoing maintenance of the browser flash plugin for chrome/chromium, at least on GNU/Linux. Chrome/chromium do not ship with flash built in, but they *do* (did?) download it from google.com into a per-user $HOME area. Assuming the user was allowed to talk to google, of course. Firefox users had a third-party hack to download the chromium blob (from google.com), which IIRC broke at least once due to Google changing what API it used (this was back before firefox went webext). Stand-alone players (inc. AIR) were dropped when Adobe abandoned (linux) flash on Google's doorstep, because Google couldn't monetize that either.
On 29/12/20 11:01 am, Trent W. Buck via luv-talk wrote:
Wen Lin via luv-talk wrote:
Recently a friend of mine asked me a question: "I just got a message that ADOBE Flash is no longer available free of charge in 2021. Does the Ubuntu system have any equivalent Flash Player so that I can continue to watch videos on Facebook etc?"
[history brain-dump follows]
Last time I looked, Google (not Adobe) had 100% responsibility of ongoing maintenance of the browser flash plugin for chrome/chromium, at least on GNU/Linux.
No, Chrome ships it, but Adobe maintain it (mostly, there's some weirdness around the plugin interface).
Chrome/chromium do not ship with flash built in, but they *do* (did?) download it from google.com into a per-user $HOME area. Assuming the user was allowed to talk to google, of course.
Chrome ships it in the browser, I don't believe they've bothered to split it out, but it has been disabled by default for a while. By the time splitting it out would have made sense they were planning the sunset anyway.
Firefox users had a third-party hack to download the chromium blob (from google.com), which IIRC broke at least once due to Google changing what API it used (this was back before firefox went webext).
Last I cared there was still the NPAPI file for FireFox (and in my case back then, Opera), by the time webext FF came about I'd not needed flash in my main browser for a while.
Stand-alone players (inc. AIR) were dropped when Adobe abandoned (linux) flash on Google's doorstep, because Google couldn't monetize that either.
Er, no. AIR was dropped for everyone a long time ago, unrelated.
Quoting Trent W. Buck (trentbuck@gmail.com):
Wen Lin via luv-talk wrote:
Recently a friend of mine asked me a question: "I just got a message that ADOBE Flash is no longer available free of charge in 2021. Does the Ubuntu system have any equivalent Flash Player so that I can continue to watch videos on Facebook etc?"
[history brain-dump follows]
Last time I looked, Google (not Adobe) had 100% responsibility of ongoing maintenance of the browser flash plugin for chrome/chromium, at least on GNU/Linux.
Google's implementation is called Pepper Flash. People determined to have a Flash interpreter in Chromium can find instructions about how to do so, getting the Pepper Flash thing. E.g., Debian has it as package pepperflashplugin-nonfree .
Chrome/chromium do not ship with flash built in....
Last I heard, Google Chrome has always preinstalled Pepper Flash. People wanting a Flash extension on Firefox for Linux can, I suppose, install the GNU gnash or Lightspark or swfdec plugins(?). Not tried, didn't care enough to, glad the thing's dying. Might be too old for new-ish Firefox given the browser's EOLing of old extensions and such. I don't think NSAPI plugins have been discussed much since around 2012 or so. ;-> -- Cheers, "Like looking both ways before crossing the street, and Rick Moen then getting hit by a submarine." -- Clarke Smith, age 9, rick@linuxmafia.com winner of Washington Post's contest for best description McQ! (4x80) of the year 2020 in a single word or phrase.
participants (6)
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Brian May -
Jason White -
Julien Goodwin -
Rick Moen -
Trent W. Buck -
Wen Lin