A Blog From Behind the Trenches

Update: Opera Mobile 10 for S60 apparently does not support plugins yet. As it is a beta, this might change in the final version.

If you are wondering whether Opera Mobile 10 for S60 supports Flash or not (and if not, if it will ever support it), the short answer is (as far as I know):

You need the Flash plugin.

No browser supports Flash natively, since Flash is a plugin. This means that as long as a browser supports plugins and a Flash plugin is available for your platform, it should be possible to use the plugin to view Flash content. Some browsers also use a remote server to handle the plugin content, and then passes it on to the browser client in a format suitable for that browser. (Opera Turbo does not transcore plugin content (such as Flash), so that will not get you Flash support either.)

As I understand it, Opera Mobile 10 does (or should) support plugins, but I'm not sure if a Flash plugin is available for S60. If it is, and it doesn't work in Opera, it's probably a bug in either the plugin, or in our plugin support (report bugs in Opera Mobile for S60 in the Symbian forum).

If anyone knows about a Flash plugin for S60, let me know.

So should Opera bundle Flash, if possible? Probably not. We did that on Desktop, and that led to all sorts of problems, such as security flaws in Flash forcing us to release updates to Opera. The Flash plugin is also a pretty large download, and that is a major reason to keep it as a separate download.

And of course, Flash is a closed, proprietary, inaccessible technology which actually puts everyone at risk because it's a single point of failure and therefore a very tempting target for virus and malware authors.

Adobe is pushing for Flash to be used in U.S. Open Government initiatives. How proprietary, closed and inaccessible is supposed to be combined with "open", I don't know. I do know that the government should definitely not be promoting closed, proprietary, inaccessible, insecure and harmful technologies.

One of the comments on the antitrust complaint against Microsoft I see a lot is: "So what if most people are using IE and aren't aware that there are choices? I'm using Opera/Firefox/Chrome just fine."

Sometimes we may feel that something doesn't really affect us. But does IE's dominance on the Web affect us even though it might not feel that way?

The answer is: Yes, definitely. But the problems with a monoculture on the Web extends beyond browsers! A single point of failure is a bad thing no matter what.

Browser monoculture

The recent ActiveX security flaws in IE once again show us that a browser monoculture is a bad thing because those looking to infect people's computers will have a single target with a very nice return of investment. And those millions of compromised computers can be used for things like sending spam to the rest of us.

But it goes much further than just IE. One could argue that just about any kind of dominance of the Web is a bad thing.

Read more...

Update 2009-09-01: A new version of the Internet Channel was released today, and it has Flash Lite 3.1 (basically Flash 9) support. It looks like Nintendo and Adobe finally heard your calls for an update!

The old text of this blog post was as follows:

So Opera for Wii/the Wii Browser/the Internet Channel is finally out (that's our community manager Espen on the pic, by the way).

Reviews look very good, and people are commenting on how fast it is and how smoothly it operates. (Remember that you can continue to give the development team feedback.)

However, there is one thing a lot of people seem to be asking about:

Why didn't we update the Flash plugin to a more recent version?

The answer is simple: there is no way to do so. It is out of both Opera and Nintendo's hands.

(Update: Even if Adobe was to license a newer version, Nintendo still makes all the decisions. It is up to Nintendo to decide what the Internet Channel supports (or doesn't).)

The latest version of the Flash SDK (Software Development Kit) offered by Adobe is version 7, so that's what anyone who is not a Windows, Linux or Mac PC have to settle with. To support Flash on a phone or device, you have to license the Flash SDK from Adobe, and as long as they do not provide a more recent version, there is nothing you can do.

If Adobe had offered a more recent version, no one would have been more thrilled than us. It would have made more sites work, and that would lead to less frustration to our users.