"Flash Broken on Linux": is it Opera Software ASA policy?

"Flash Broken on Linux": is it Opera Software ASA policy?

Opera Software ASA
P.O. Box 4214 Nydalen
NO-0401 OSLO
NORWAY


Milan, 28 August 2012


Subject: "Flash Broken on Linux": is it Opera Software ASA policy?

Dear Lady or Sir,

I know that the upstream supplier (Adobe Systems) getting in an exclusive agreement with a competitor (Google Inc.) to supply Flash integrated with the Chrome browser for Linux is causing problems. But Opera has been using plugins designed for others, including proprietary plugins, for quite a time.

I use Opera not because I want to use Opera no matter what, I use Opera to access websites. Opera is a browser, not an abstract software deity.
Websites use Flash, and contrary to Apple Corp. propaganda it does NOT seem to go away.

Adobe Flash has been unusable on Opera for Linux since March 2012. The free alternative gnash is NOT an alternative in that it does not work except in a few marginal cases, and even on those without much reliability. This leaves Opera as a non Flash-capable browser on Linux.

The level of discourse one can read on the forums and the knowledge base points out to this problem being ignored by the company, and thoroughly misunderstood by the user base. In more specific words, advice on how to make Flash work again on the Linux platform is a non-usable mix of non-responsiveness and untrue statements. These have heavily contributed me to waste between 60 and 80 hours researching the issue and trying to fix it.

As a faithful Opera user since v. 5.2, I have installed it on countless people's computers, but now I am sadly finding that don't care anymore.

I would appreciate a definite policy statement on part of Opera Software ASA on whether Flash is ever going to be supported again on the Linux platform. Missing an indication that Flash will work again, I will uninstall the browser on all of my own machines and stop supporting and advocating its use.


I thank you for attention, and remain eagerly awaiting a reply.


Filippo Cattaneo, OPSTRA SAS
Via Copernico 57, Milan, Italy
skype:spamhog

Ah! well all I can say is that, flash is working here.

Originally posted by ohme:

all I can say is that, flash is working here.

+1

+2 Linux Mint and Puppy Linux too.

I am so glad for you!
But this does not move the issue forward much.
IMO this adds to the S/(S+N) issue in the forums I was lamenting.

Here NOT working on Ubuntu 12.04 and 10.04, Scientific Linux 6.2 and 6.3, Debian 6.0.5 on 3 i 386 machines.

Only one (the one I am using right now) has a nvidia card linked to a post-March crash mode. (Of course you knew everything about the nvidia crash mode and how Adobe did away several the early bug reports and is leaving the current one stand, albeit unanswered, right?)
https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3153990

Gnash working intermittently (maybe, seemingly) on Youtube and a few places without DRM aspirations (the BBC has aspirations, implemented and at times annoying, but not actually even turned on) but...
http://gnashdev.org/?q=node/51
And the appearance of gnash working might not even be real...See below.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5yLyWbTipU <- this plays file on my Opera on my main DT although there is NO FLASH /GNASH PLUGIN INSTALLED AT THE MOMENT. (Packages removed and purged, plugin files hand-removed, plugins not detected by Opera)

Workarounds exist, such as get_iplayer for BBC multimedia
http://www.infradead.org/get_iplayer/html/get_iplayer.html
that takes advantage of pure flashvideo and mp3/mp4 players, whether gotten legally or not. Thsi is tantamount to digging into the code and trying to call the streams by hand, only much cleverer. Been there, done that, transformed ugly broken non-DRM Flash pages into handy VLC-playable files...

The bundled Flash that comes with the latest stable Google Chrome is the only one that will get updated (, and won't be available to browsers that do not implement the Pepper Plugin API (PPAPI) to properly sandbox and "steal" [ ;-) ] the plugin.

(An interesting IBM Flash sandboxing review is here
http://media.blackhat.com/bh-us-12/Briefings/Sabanal/BH_US_12_Sabanal_Digging_Deep_WP.pdf)

If it works, e.g. on multimedia, are you positive you are not actually using html5 + VP8?

Are you aware that youtube sometimes multiencodes, DOES NOT TELL YOU what you are using, and has probably enrolled you in a html5 + VP8/h.264 beta test without telling you? (Opera does use VP8 codec for content wrapped in WebM format but AFAIK does not use h.264)

Do you know how to tell the difference? Do you know that much Flash-lookalike video on Opera isn't flash at all?

Do you know that some so called "Flash testing" videos on Youtube run fine without ANY flash plugin installed?

If it works, which version are you running? Is it one from after or before March 2012? (Yes, I don't want to downgrade to a working version).

I so wish that ugly technology will go away, but the pace is glacial.... :-(
http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cp-flash/all/all

Originally posted by spamhog:

Only one (the one I am using right now) has a nvidia card linked to a post-March crash mode. (Of course you knew everything about the nvidia crash mode and how Adobe did away several the early bug reports and is leaving the current one stand, albeit unanswered, right?)
https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3153990

Ah, I have seen that in Ubuntu.

Originally posted by spamhog:

If it works, e.g. on multimedia, are you positive you are not actually using html5 + VP8?

WebM doesn't steal keyboard focus, nor abides by plugins on demand (although some Flash doesn't either). And of course there's the right-click menu. HTML5 video is just much more pleasant as far as the concept of playing videos in browser goes. (Note, this has nothing to do with either Opera or Linux, because Flash is equally annoying in IE on Windows.)

Originally posted by spamhog:

If it works, which version are you running? Is it one from after or before March 2012? (Yes, I don't want to downgrade to a working version).

On Debian it would seem to be 10,3,162,29. I guess it's ancient.

Flash player 11.2.202.236 here on both versions of Linux i use.

Flash 11.2.202.238 here, and according to this page, it's latest!

Works well on 12.02, fails on 12.50

Thank you!

Yet, confuseder I remain...

There seems to be a mix of old versions, distro-specific breakage, and a pinch of imponderable.

OTOH, I just noticed some YT video page that used to be Flash only a couple of weeks ago.
Now it briefly laments the lack of Flash (missing plugin icon), then no,
it changes its mind and without further explanation
proceeds to playing regularly.

Youtube is owned by Google who happens to be the sole distributor of Chromified Flash For Linux, so it's unlikely to show an insulting notice such as "your Flash is broken as if you banged it on your head very hard, but don't worry, you don't really need it, thank you very much."

An issue fr the WTF department.

Also gnash has a right-click-on-video menu, right?

I couldn't tell you, Don't use gnash, And never have.

Tried Gnash some time ago (last year, when Mageia 1.0 came out), performance was so poor I immediately disabled it and installed Flash. Things have presumably changed somewhat since then, but I haven't yet decided to see if it might be workable by now ...

Originally posted by spamhog:

OTOH, I just noticed some YT video page that used to be Flash only a couple of weeks ago.
Now it briefly laments the lack of Flash (missing plugin icon), then no,
it changes its mind and without further explanation
proceeds to playing regularly.

That's probably because instead of using HTML's built-in fallback mechanisms they do everything with Javascript.

I had already started a thread regarding the Flash issue: http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=1504462 Despite "works for me" I got nothing out of it.

HTML5 video is also unusable within Opera, because H.264 support is missing and hardware acceleration doesn't work. Also Opera doesn't support live streaming without Flash.

Once I had used Opera on FreeBSD, which never got a native flash plugin. That was annoying, but not a real issue, because the workaround was running the working Linux plugin in wrapper. Now I have a broken plugin and no solution at all.

I confirm that my Opera 12.02 and flash plugin don't work anymore
Any site with flash says me that I have no flash installed.
At the same time Firefox still works with flash on this machine!!!
Also in virtual machine Virtualbox I have working the same versions Opera and flash!

On the opera:plugins page I have
***********
Plug-ins
None found
***********

On preferences\advanced\content\plug-in options I have at the bottom full path of /usr/lib/opera/plugins:/usr/lib/flash-plugin:/usr/lib/mozilla/plugins
But none of them above in the window "detected plug ins".

What can I do to make flash working?

No matter where I go on the web, Opera on XP doesn't gun the CPU the way it does on Linux. It does hog RAM roughly the same: usually over 1/2 GB even with few tabs open. But on this XP machine I have 4GB. :-)

Tempted to try Windows Opera + Windows Flash on Wine, but it doesn't look good:
http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=26176

You might be surprised. We've had some users say that Windows Opera under Wine is better than the native Linux version. Though of course that was 11.x ...

Flash player 11.2.202.236 here on both versions of Linux i use.

Flash 11.2.202.238 here, and according to this page, it's latest!

One critical problem here is that Flash 11.2 is being made obsolete by Adobe. Yes, 11.2.202.x is the most current for 11.2, but Adobe is no longer willing to support the old model of plugins. 11.3, which is based on libpepper, is the future, and currently, Google Chrome is the only browser that uses the libpepper plugin. As I understand, libpepper can be adapted to other browsers; Google has a head start, but that doesn't mean that their browser will necessarily be the only browser in the Linux landscape to support Flash.

One thing is that flash player version is obsolete.
But the other thing is that it stopped to work with Opera at all!
I think this is a bug of the Opera itself.

Originally posted by Comrad:

One thing is that flash player version is obsolete.
But the other thing is that it stopped to work with Opera at all!
I think this is a bug of the Opera itself.

Well it works fine here, As said above.

Current status of Flash for Opera/Linux:

http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/installers/archive/fp_10.2.159.1_archive.zip

32 bit only, stable, fullscreen works, EOL - INSECURE

http://download.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/installers/archive/fp_10.3.183.23_archive.zip

32 bit only, stable, works partially (flickers), fullscreen works, security-supported only, but EOL by the end of this year

http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/get/flashplayer/installers/archive/fp_11.2.202.238_archive.zip

32/64 bit, unstable, either video playback broken or fullscreen broken, security-supported only (EOL in about four years).

Current status of Flash 11.3.31.232 for Google Chrome 21.0.1180.89:

32/64 bit, stable, video playback and fullscreen works, actively developed

So which plugin should an Opera user choose?

Originally posted by LinuxMint7:

Well it works fine here, As said above.

You posts aren't helpful and add nothing useful to this thread. Stop trolling, please!

Originally posted by jtsn:

Originally posted by LinuxMint7:

Well it works fine here, As said above.

You posts aren't helpful and add nothing useful to this thread. Stop trolling, please!

Trolling ?, Don't make me laugh.

I posted that 'FLASH' is working for ME, I posted that i use 'LINUX' (See my sig for specifics).
I also posted what version of 'FLASH' and Opera i am using.

If that isn't helpful, Then you must be stupid.

So where's the trolling ?.

No point in replying to that Mint. Some people think they own threads.

You should of course use the latest version - Adobe says that you should be using 11.2.202.238. And yes, it works in Opera.