[MatthewPhillips]

Google has a nasty habit of developing some technology in a dark room, then dropping it on the web community and being confused when no one is that interested (Dart is the other big example). It makes me wonder if they really want these projects to be cross-platform successful or not.

[shimon_e]

Adobe is dropping linux support after 11.2. With the except of Chrome due to a new API that "aims to provide a layer between the plugin and browser that abstracts away differences between browser and operating system implementations."

Given that linux really hasn't been a priority for them and they are dropping flash all together; this isn't really news.

The press release says Adobe worked with Google on Pepper. So for them to have a bias towards it isn't groundbreaking.

[gcp]

With the except of Chrome due to a new API

This is what's hard to understand: they are not dropping NPAPI on Windows, so it's not like the Chrome API is the enabler here.

[shimon_e]

From the press release it seems NPAPI is OS dependent while Pepper is less so.

This all assume there is actually going to be something more than security updates after 11.2 for other platforms. And that it is going to be something we would want on Linux.

[justinschuh]

>From the press release it seems NPAPI is OS dependent while Pepper is less so.

Correct. The NPAPI version of Flash is very platform-dependent; whereas Pepper Flash is almost completely platform neutral, and Chrome OS needs most of the same Pepper platform bits anyway. So, our maintenance overhead for Pepper Flash on Linux is very small. On top of that, Linux is broadly deployed throughout Google (and is very popular among Chrome developers), so we're scratching our own itch a bit.

[0x0]

Flash provides a lot of hardware abstractions, from H.264 accelerated video, to webcam and microphone access, and accelerated 3d (openGL) rendering. Does the Pepper API provide wrappers for all this stuff? Otherwise it would seem that Flash for Linux would still need to carry a lot of platform-dependent plumbing.

[justinschuh]

Yes, the sandbox disallows direct hardware access. So, the PPAPI provides abstractions to those underlying capabilities.

[jaredsohn]

>This all assume there is actually going to be something more than security updates after 11.2 for other platforms. And that it is going to be something we would want on Linux.

There will be updates and they will be desirable in Linux assuming people continue creating Flash content that makes use of the new features: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3621096.

[shimon_e]

Interesting. So there will be another 3 version with the following features:

Keyboard input support in full-screen mode

Improved audio support for working with low-latency audio

Ability to progressively stream textures for Stage 3D content

LZMA compression support for ByteArray

Frame label events

ActionScript workers (enables concurrent ActionScript execution on separate threads)

Support for advanced profiling

Support for more hardware-accelerated video cards (from 2005/2006) in order to expand availability of hardware accelerated content

Improved ActionScript performance when targeting Apple iOS (What the??? iOS???)

Performance index API to inform about performance capabilities of current environment

Release outside mouse event API

Refactoring and modernizing the current core Flash runtime code base

Work on the ActionScript Virtual Machine

Updates to the ActionScript language

--

Doesn't seem like there will be anything new that can not be currently albeit less efficiently.

[jaredsohn]

My assumption is that among {NPAPI/Windows, NPAPI/Linux, PPAPI/Windows, PPAPI/Linux}, NPAPI/Linux provides the least value for the work required.

[shimon_e]

Its more like among {NPAPI/Firefox/Windows, NPAPI/Firefox/Linux, NPAPI/IE/Windows, PPAPI/ALL, etc}, NPAPI/Firefox/Linux provides the least value.

[bzbarsky]

There is no NPAPI/IE/Windows, for what it's worth. It's ActiveX/IE/Windows.