Look, Adobe, can we please get with the times and start making a product that works on Linux? Please? It’s getting closer to 2010 and we’re still missing flying cars, meals in pills and a flash player that actually works most of the time. You see that? I’d even settle for most of the time right now. The sad truth is, Flash locks up on my current Ubuntu install, with the latest Flash release and it happens all the time.
Why on Earth should my modern browsers (Firefox, Opera) still freeze up on every third embedded video I try to play? Websites are rendered ugly as hell because Flash just doesn’t know what to do with them. You do realize that by hindering a portion of today’s web browsing consumers you’re eventually affecting your own bottom line, right? Even a small portion who can’t do the things that web developers, web store owners and viral marketing execs expect them to do can be significant if it impacts delivery and sales.
For those who aren’t employed by Adobe. Yeah, I think that Flash sites are not the way to go, even with Google’s revelation that Flash can now be indexed. The truth of the matter is Flash is here and it’s probably here to stay so we need Adobe to please swallow whatever bitter pill they’re fumbling around with and just get a working version out to all of us in Linuxland so we can watch cats attack string on YouTube or whatever it is we’re wanting to do online. Okay? I know of lots of local, small sites like restaurants and small brick and mortar shops who have Flash front ends on their sites. And you know what? It stinks not being able to patronize them - for them and for me.
We need a working Flash. Let’s hope 10 does a much better job of it than 9. Until then, I’ll be taking my own petty mental revenge by referring to this monstrosity of a rich media crap fest as ‘flunk’ using my inside voice. No, that won’t fix anything but at least it will get that grimace on my face into a twisted smile as I kill and restart my browser yet again.
Technorati Tags: flash, linux, adobe, firefox, ubuntu, flunk
September 4th, 2008 at 11:06 am
And don’t get me started on the “where the heck is native 64-bit”, either. They’re stonewalling that much as Twitter is stonewalling “where the heck did IM and Tracking go?”.
September 4th, 2008 at 11:07 am
No kidding. For something that’s become a defacto web standard, they really need to get on the ball and make a product that works.
September 4th, 2008 at 11:24 am
Um, sometimes this isn’t so much Flash as it is the way you arranged your kernel or your video drivers.
Oh, and who hasn’t had that problem where a popdown menu goes UNDERNEATH a flash animation? Talk about aggravation!
September 4th, 2008 at 11:26 am
Never had a problem developing and using Flash 9/10 on any distro of Linux. Some people have bad luck / bad configs
September 4th, 2008 at 11:27 am
I’ve got three ubuntu boxes, two of them pretty much stock and none of them play all that well with flash. My lappy is the worst, but it’s true, I’ve mucked around with it a lot more.
I’ve had drop downs go under, and just 10 minutes ago I had a little flash effect stick on the page and NOT GO AWAY. ARGH!
September 4th, 2008 at 11:32 am
While I personally have never had problems using Flash in Linux, I have had unbelievable problems getting Flash to work on a friend’s Windows machine. For some folks the luck goes the other way.
As much as flash is a pain, just wait until Silverlight becomes more popular:
http://dotancohen.com/eng/library_of_congress.html
Make sure that you write to every website that uses Silverlight and complain. Let me know about them so that I can complain too.
September 4th, 2008 at 12:05 pm
64bit was demo’ed internally in adobe: http://vadi-blog.com/2008/08/28/adobe-does-care/
September 4th, 2008 at 12:08 pm
Flash mostly works for me in Debian Sid although it can get quite greedy with the CPU cycles. Nobody mentions the poor saps running BSD. When is Adobe going to finally address the lack of a native Flash player for BSD? Sure BSD users can emulate linux and use a linux browser but with the ubiquity of Flash on the web, it is long past time that Adobe filled that hole. There is a petition online that people can sign to help bring Adobe’s attention to the matter.
http://www.petitiononline.com/flash4me/petition.html
September 4th, 2008 at 12:09 pm
Cool Vadim. I hope they get this worked out.
September 4th, 2008 at 12:15 pm
Wouldn’t it be better to go directly to the bottom of the problem and instead of demanding a player that request the format to be opened?
This is the reason why it’s terrible to have closed formats standardized. Everyone else on the planet depends on who have the keys to the box.
September 4th, 2008 at 12:16 pm
Alternatively, I hope The Gnash Project catches up soon.
Last time I tried it the rendering was much slower and choppier (for animations - I didn’t check videos) than Adobe’s player, but Gnash was making good progress.
September 4th, 2008 at 12:19 pm
Edo - I don’t see Adobe giving up their dominance by opening Flash. I think it would be wonderful if they did so but personally kind of futile to push them to do it.
Yes, you’re right, closed standards stink.
Epicanis, I’ve not had much good luck with Gnash either - but if they get better, I’d switch in a heartbeat!
September 4th, 2008 at 12:48 pm
Yawn. Adobe is a commercial company. It can do whatever it wants, and generally commercial companies do things for the people who pay them. Making Flash work on Linux may not be their top priority because — newsflash — you’re a petty, complaining, minority who haven’t ever bought a copy of Flash. Flash CS3 Professional is ~$700. Why not start coughing up or shut the hell up? Oh, it doesn’t run on Linux? Is that Adobe’s fault too? Oh, it doesn’t run on Amiga either. God, Adobe are really neglecting the market, eh? Why don’t you start complaining why you weren’t front of the line when Google released Chrome instead?
Man, you guys suck.
September 4th, 2008 at 1:02 pm
Tony you seem to have missed the point. Adobe sells Flash at $700 so the whole world can come and visit those fancy sites created by their product. As Linux becomes much more widespread (i.e. embedded devices, netbooks, Lenovo and Dell products to name just a few) this becomes more and more of a problem for Adobe.
I could give a rats ass if CS3 ran on Linux, I just want a product that is used to create web pages to work in any modern browser, on any modern platform. It’s in Adobe’s best interest too.
I don’t really care about chrome, because I don’t need it to view a significant chunk of the web.
September 4th, 2008 at 2:53 pm
Dude, flash works fine. Check your video drivers, maybe you are using compiz or xgl. I agree though, flash should be open sourced or replaced by an open source project, where is google???
September 4th, 2008 at 4:10 pm
Hey Tony, neeewwwwwwwwsflash! A hell of a lot of web site/application developers use Linux. Why should we produce sites that leverage Flash when we can’t even use it ourselves?
Furthermore, I personally think that Adobe’s inability to make Flash work well across all commonly used platforms makes them look like they just can’t get their act together.
September 4th, 2008 at 4:28 pm
latest build + flashblock made ubuntu tolerable for me
September 4th, 2008 at 5:34 pm
I upgraded to Flash 10 Beta (w/ Firefox 3 & fully updated Ubuntu 8.04). Firefox no longer crashes.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pulseaudio/+bug/192888
In summary, the solution to this bug:
1. Upgrade to Flash 10 (at release candidate status as of 13/8)
2. Drop libflashsupport completely (it causes instability in Flash 9 and 10)
3. Fix bug #198453
September 4th, 2008 at 7:36 pm
I wish crashing was the issue here.. My problem is I have no sound when I view flash content! I’ve tried some workarounds no luck I’m going to give a try of Flash 10 beta see if that works.
-Kevin
September 4th, 2008 at 9:58 pm
We’re hoping that with all that money we give Adobe, they keep delivering an inferior web browsing experience on Linux machines. It’s all in our master plan.
September 5th, 2008 at 11:25 am
Hey Paul Dorman, I agree and that’s the point. You Linux web developers can continue making rich web apps using Java applets or Gnash or whatever the hell it is you guys use. Linux is *not* a commonly used platform. When it is, you’ll have a decent version of Flash Player for your Booboo-untu? Mmmmmkay?
(You’re probably going to tell me you want Flash Player for your Apache server)
September 7th, 2008 at 11:38 am
I believe Adobe should get a shift on with a decent Linux release of the Flash player. x64 support is a joke, they are really taking the mickey with full screen support, and I am personally appalled at how unstable the plugin is. There’s no excuse for it!
@Tony Blake: You clearly have no clue how computers work, so I’ll explain something very briefly. Flash is not a server-side app, it’s client side. Pathetic little strops aren’t going to get you anywhere.
September 7th, 2008 at 4:42 pm
Hey Tony, are you getting paid by Adobe to troll like this or is it a hobby? Did you miss the point that arsgeek made about Linux being at the heart of more and more handheld devices etc- the folks that buy those are not the “petty, complaining, minority who haven’t ever bought a copy of Flash”, they are regular consumers that want to surf the web on their devices without issue- and as for the assumption that nobody that runs Linux has bought a copy of Flash, well, how about you buy clue eh? It would probably be cheaper than the latest version of Dreamweaver and you’ll get more mileage out of it to…
That said, I’m running Kubuntu on a 64-bit Gateway laptop with the repository version (restricted extras) of Flash and have had no issues- thankfully, although the things being under other things is an issue, particularly on this site:
http://remix.nin.com/
That’s annoying…
September 9th, 2008 at 7:31 am
Flash offers great solutions for problems you wouldn’t have without Flash. Learn to live without the overwhelmingly useless sites that force you to have it. Addicted to YouTube? Join a 12 steps group!
September 19th, 2008 at 8:56 am
Oh and while you’re at it, Adobe, do us a 64bit version? Many thanks.
October 7th, 2008 at 4:41 pm
I hear for you. I’ve had a lot of problems with Flash under Linux, and it took a lot of configuration which I would imagine would put off people from even considering Linux. Flash is an important web technology, so you can kinda see why it would be offputting.
One more thing, there needs to be some way of developing flash under Linux. I’m not sure if there is any, but if there isn’t, there really needs to be. It’s something I have to look to Windows to work on.
October 7th, 2008 at 5:16 pm
Yeah Flash do you want us to start using Silverlight while your dev. test procrastinates on making Flash work in Linux?
If only Gnash was easy to setup / completely working I’d ditch you. I can’t play more CPU-intensive Flash games for crap, and high-motion videos tear on even my year-old Core 2 Duo because the flvs are horribly handled.
October 7th, 2008 at 6:58 pm
I haven’t had to actually restart a browser because of flash, but it still is pretty slow. Although, the newest (subversion) version of Webkit/GTK+ seems to get way better performance. Maybe they already fixed it?
October 8th, 2008 at 7:52 am
It took them 2 years to put out a universal binary of the Shockwave plugin for Mac. 2 whole years after the Intel switch. I had to run Firfox in Rosetta emulation, meaning it was slllooooowwwwwww as heck for a whole year. If that’s any indication of the momentum of projects within Adobe it does not bode well for Linux.
October 8th, 2008 at 4:51 pm
I run a stock Linux kernel, stock xorg, and use awesome, fluxbox, or e17 as a graphical environment on very moderate but modern hardware, and don’t have a problem with Flash. Ubuntu and other instant desktop/noob distros tend to not be set up specifically for your hardware and the software you intend to run on them, but rather use a bloated catch-all approach out of the box (check and see just how many chipsets you have xorg packages for. Last time I checked, Ubuntu and Debian came with about all of them. My system only has one, for my hardware, and I know this because I installed it myself. It took about fifteen seconds to do so and get it running.) and from what I’ve seen, a very large portion of their users are so obsessed with taxing what hardware they do have with desktop eye-candy that the little bugs in proprietary software that those of us with more streamlined systems don’t usually notice tend to wreak havoc on their systems. I suggest you take the time to learn how to properly configure your graphical system to work with your hardware (the price you pay for portability + what is intended to be a free diy system), and you’ll suffer much less breakage. In the long run, if you want to use “Linux”, learn a little about the internal workings and make it do what you want it to do instead of complaining to companies who have no intention of supporting your platform. If you’re not willing to learn, use a system with paid support (Redhat, etc.) or go back to proprietary systems.
The point of Free Software is the freedom and availability of tools to make your system do what you want it to do, not to make a free Mac/Windows clone with bragging rights.
October 8th, 2008 at 10:28 pm
Flash 9 is still working ok on my k’buntu setup,with the occasional crash, but not much to bitch about. BUT I am STILL waiting for a Linux version of the Shockwave Player… I miss my Isketch.net…Whaddya think?
October 14th, 2008 at 2:20 pm
my flash issues stopped when i 1. updated to latest flash beta. 2. upgraded firefox to 3.0.3 and potentially 3. cleared my ~/.mozilla folder.
For alsa issues (mentioned) I usually “fix” them by doing a sudo lsof /dev/snd/* and killing the apps hogging the audio device.
However i don’t use ubuntu and don’t use pulseaudio.
October 16th, 2008 at 8:06 am
In all fairness.. you could always go ahead and make one that works yourself.
I didn’t think so.
October 16th, 2008 at 9:15 am
Here Here! I concur! I don’t know what exactly it is but I have a ridiculously fast system and a great video card but some flash simply kills my system. I’d like to see improvements as well.
October 31st, 2008 at 4:50 pm
For most of you fanboy linux users, I think its the PEBMAC that is causing the problem. If you dont know what PEBMAC is, http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=pebmac.
November 12th, 2008 at 4:04 pm
I’ve got flash working fine on Ubuntu hardy heron. Granted, it took a little tweaking, but it’s pretty much fail-proof right now.