Ruari's thoughts

Looking at recent incoming Opera Linux bug reports and reading online forums (including our own) I see a number of Ubuntu users reporting problems with Flash. Initially one might think we should get our act together and sort things out ASAP. However digging deeper the situation is slightly more complex. Not all of the problems we see are Opera issues, in fact I might even go so far as to say that the majority are probably not. Many of these users appear to have one of the alternative Free Software Flash plugins installed (SWFdec or Gnash). 'So what?' you might ask. Well, whilst the alternative Flash plugin projects are both quite impressive, and have great potential for the future, there is a problem: SWFdec and Gnash's current state of Flash compatibility is sub par when compared with the official plugin from Adobe. Additionally we have a known bug with SWFdec meaning that it will not work under Opera at present (DSK-212990). You may be wondering why we have not fixed this yet. I guess the main reason is that SWFdec and Gnash are currently alpha software, hence we have focused on other more pressing issues (incidentally Gnash does work with Opera).

The next question that springs to mind is why do so many of these users have an alternative flash plugin installed? If they were users who avoided all non Open Source software it might be understandable but they are Opera users. Nope, the reason would appear to be something else.

I suspect it is 'how' users going about enabling Flash support. On a clean install of Ubuntu 9.04, Firefox is the default installed browser. Navigating with Firefox to a flash site for the first time will cause a missing plugins message to be displayed. Sounds good right? Sure, but the problem is that clicking on this will display three possible Flash plugins. The default listed is the SWFdec Plugin (a.k.a. the swfdec-mozilla package) rather than one of the Adobe packages. I would imagine that many users will therefore simply pick this. Another way to install Flash support is via "Applications > Add/Remove...". However this lists SWFdec and Gnash above 'Adobe Flash 10' (a.k.a. adobe-flashplugin) or 'Macromedia Flash Plugin' (a.k.a. flashplugin-installer, flashplugin-nonfree) when sorted by popularity. (Why there are two packages [with three package names] for Adobe Flash plugin I don't know but lets leave that to one side for a moment.) These two issues increase the likelihood of an Ubuntu user installing an alternative flash plugin instead of the official one.

In addition to the fact that SWFdec/Gnash have less compatibility with Flash sites, another problem is that if a user realises that he/she does not have an official Flash plugin installed, fixing the situation is not as straight forward as you might imagine. Many users would try to remedy the situation by installing Adobe's plugin. However there is a fair chance he/she will fail. Why? Well, if either of the swfdec-mozilla or mozilla-plugin-gnash packages is already installed then they will remain the default Flash plugin listed in /usr/lib/mozilla/plugin/ (flashplugin-alternative.so is a symbolic link to the default flash plugin). Installing the 'Macromedia Flash Plugin' (flashplugin-installer, flashplugin-nonfree) package on top will result in the plugin only being placed in /usr/lib/flashplugin-installer/. Installing the 'Adobe Flash 10' (a.k.a. adobe-flashplugin) package on top will result in the plugin only being placed in /usr/lib/adobe-flashplugin/. Neither of these paths is scanned by Firefox or Opera by default and hence they are not detected. This can be manually remedied in Opera by navigating to 'Tools > Preferences > Advanced > Content > Plug-in options > Change Path... > Add...' and adding /usr/lib/adobe-flashplugin/ or /usr/lib/flashplugin-installer/ as appropriate but that would not be immediately obvious to most users. Many would simply assume everything went to plan and then be disappointed with the fact that they still encounter problems.

The only way to ensure that Opera 'automatically' picks up Adobe Flash is to first make sure that both swfdec-mozilla and mozilla-plugin-gnash are removed before installing flashplugin-installer, flashplugin-nonfree or the adobe-flashplugin packages.