As an offshoot of another thread that can be found here: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ml#post4841496

Jtsn said,

Here is what I've learned on the subject.

Google developed the pepper API.

That it is cross platform and browser independent.

That Adobe doesn't want to support both the NPAPI and Pepper versions of the flash player and they see Pepper as the better of the two APIs.

That Adobe will move forward with Pepper yet will keep the NPAPI version alive for five years to give all browsers time to move over to Pepper.

That once other browsers have implemented Pepper, Adobe will then provide access to the pepper version for general download.

Therefore, it doesn't appear Adobe has abandon Linux.

So, as a question for the "gurus," Does any of this ring true?

Can't answer that question, but I think (and hope) that in five years flashplayer will be even less needed.

I would question how much of the work of maintaining the Linux Flash player Adobe has actually outsourced to Google.

I seem to get better performance from pepper API than Adobe's Flash. At least that is my perception.

That appears to be the case in Linux and you have to use Chrome and, thereofore, pepperflash, with some sites or they won't work at all. However, the standard flashplayer works just fine in ms-windows with the same sites.

I would save they certainly have, aside from providing security updates at least.

From their download page:

We can learn from their commitment to Solaris. You simply can't get it anymore. You won't be able to get flash anymore for linux soon.

Which won't drop me a tear.

Say what you will about Apple, I give them massive credit for taking such a strong stand against the existence of Flash. Their victories benefit us.

NB: it has never functioned correctly, particularly the camera and sound interface, plus the incredible resource hogging. Linus should have said, Adobe is the single most difficult company to deal with, and **** *** Adobe.

Adobe continues maintaining the NPAPI version for platforms like Windows and provides new versions of the plugin for this platforms. So there is no reason for browser vendors to implement the Pepper API.

The PPAPI version of the plugin is newer and provides better hardware acceleration. And of course it is also not broken on nVidia cards (color channel swap bug).

It's just a matter of time when the binary Flash 11.2 will stop working on recent Linux distributions, because the ABI compatibility will become broken (imagine a GLIBC change). The Flash player also still depends on hald, which is unmaintained already.

So Adobe will provide security fixes till 2017, but I doubt, that we are able to run the Flash Player binary on a Linux distribution released in 2017.

So this matter has effectively eliminated browser choice on the Linux platform and restricts one to Google Chrome, the only browser with a maintained Flash Player.

And for the people hoping that Flash is completely going away: Look how the Java plugin did. :-)

I do wonder if Pepper will expand to other browsers.

What about Opera?
What do they use for flash?
I, for one, would prefer to user Opera than Chrome.

Agreed. I am hopeful we will be able to put flash behind us in the not too distant future.