I cannot help feeling 'it' has all become a bit of a mess - or is that a power struggle! This is nothing more than a 'blog' posting I'm afraid....of my latest revelations (to myself).

Due to some issues which first materialised when trying to understand why a website that required the [adobe] flash plugin was struggling to work properly. The 'work properly' problem is irrelevant perhaps, but the consequences are not.....perhaps :-)

This most likely will not be new to most folks, but it was to me after having many years fairly trouble free use.

Any way.....

I learned over the last month, ending with feedback direct from Adobe tech. support that they stopped supporting flashplayer plugin for GNU/Linux ages ago....the only updates are the odd security fix...and those are because there are a few major customers that they need to do it for. The linux plugin is old tech, out of date and really unsuitable now.

As a result, I learned that this was also related to NPAPI, an age old plugin connectivity standard that until late was used by all (well pretty much).

It was recommended I use a different OS. (yeah right) or a different linux plugin that supported....PPAPI ! So on to the t'internet to understand what PPAPI is. I don't fully, but again that may be irrelevant.

The only option then, at least as far as I could quickly sort out, was to try using Chromium...and something called 'Pepper' plugin. This is a Google 'thing' I understand....but indeed it did work (to a large degree for what I was doing).

Then I realised, having switched to Chromium and I thought with a sigh/shrug, perhaps I might use Chromium as a main option (and it does seem a lot more responsive than FF) ... that Java applets don't work any more....on Chromium that is. Oh that's right...that is because Google (and latest Chromium project) have given up on NPAPI in favour of their PPAPI.

I checked Oracle pages (and it applies to OpenJDK for that matter?) and they are unable (and perhaps unwilling due to it is a complex and perhaps unattainable issue apparently) to support re-engineering for PPAPI. Their advice, use a different browser that supports NPAPI.

In summary, for now, I have now to have several browsers to achieve things that seemingly all worked and co-operated some time back..to facilitate.... Flash, java [ok, just applets] and I dare say/fear, other things as well that will crop up as time rolls on.

Nothing stands still I appreciate, but at this time, the issues I have had have cost me loads of head-scratching to learn its down to some major players changing their game.... and suggesting it is for the better. I hope so...and that it gets sorted soon so things work well again.

May be a new standard will emerge that wraps all these up...but it would seem a long hard road to get there....so what was wrong previously. We will see.

All the best.

Oh, I agree.
The old adage, "follow the money" certainly applies here. adobe doesn't support flash for Linux, but they do for ms-windows and didn't they make "pepperflash" for google.

I've always thought google took a page right out of mickeysoft's playbook and is paying companies to push Internet users to google's products and services. As I said, follow the money.

OTOH, I haven't had any problems with flash for Linux, but you might be using different websites than I. I do use the latest version (security upgraded) provided by one of the developers of my Linux distribution of choice, Slackware64. He also provides updates for openjdk.

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Meanwhile Oracle has dropped development of the Java browser plugin completely (for all OSes) and I won't shed a tear about that, since that plugin was a mess securitywise anyways.