Adobe (Temporarily?) Kills 64-Bit Flash For Linux 272
An anonymous reader writes "It seems that with the release of the 10.1 security patches, Adobe has, at least temporarily, killed 64-bit Flash for Linux. The statement says: 'The Flash Player 10.1 64-bit Linux beta is closed. We remain committed to delivering 64-bit support in a future release of Flash Player. No further information is available at this time. Please feel free to continue your discussions on the Flash Player 10.1 desktop forums.' The 64-bit forum has been set to read-only."
Fuck flash (Score:3, Insightful)
I never had a player installed. And I'm doing just fine.
It's just yet another proprietary lock-in. And most of the time it serves just waste.
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hahaha. nice post.
I do think it's a bit overboard to say flash MUST be on any phone. However, it's nice to actually have the option, not unlike a computer (including apple pc's) and quite unlike the direct jab at iphone/ipod.
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Unless we're talking about phones. Then Flash is a must-have and any (i)phone that doesn't have it is a completely useless piece of garbage.
Hmmm ... I see that this comment got two "insightful" mods, and one "funny". This is added data to support the widespread belief that /. mods generally lack a sense of humor.
Of course, I can say that because I'm not at the moment a moderator. But recently I've had mod status more than I haven't, so I suppose any hour now I'll have to change my tune.
Actually, I have an
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Whoosh.
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Honestly, I don't know anyone who uses Flash for things other than video...
It's also quite good to provide HTML5 capabilities to prehistoric browsers. a great example is svgWeb, which lets you use SVG in any (almost) browser. if possible, will be native SVG, if not, it loads a flash renderer. ... or for better-than-terrible uploads, SWFuploader is a real lifesaver. ... or for local storage, as per PersistJS
IOW, in a perfect world, nobody would need it. but we do.
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It doesn't really matter that Flash is terrible and useless- it isn't Apple's place to tell me what I can or can't do with *my* phone. I may be an outlier but I won't be a customer as long as Apple behaves like they maintain some sort of ownership over their customer's possessions.
Get used to it if you want to deal with Apple devices. Apple is very aggressively moving down the path towards the locked-down experience, where they decide how you use your devices and what you do with them. They say their customers don't want choices, they just want the Apple experience.
Jobs smugly says that the PC world, where the user has a billion choices for just about every decision, is dying (just like BSD). In their mind, it is ABSOLUTELY Apple's place to tell you what you can do with Apple's phone
Flash Sucks (Score:5, Funny)
That's one down. Now, get them to cancel flash on i386 Linux, then on MacOS, then Windows, and we'll be all set.
flash killer (Score:5, Funny)
First Apple, and now Adobe as the new flash killer. Good job
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Hey, at least you Linux lot had a 64-bit Flash in the first place. Us poor Windows users have to drop to the 32-bit browser if we want to run pointless rubbish (well, excluding Windows itself, but you know what I mean).
This is why Flash must die. (Score:4, Insightful)
Yea Flash is an Open standard....
Let's move on to HTML5 and or even JavaFX and drop this none standard standard.
Re:This is why Flash must die. (Score:5, Insightful)
They need to sort out the HTML5 subtitle standard, and someone needs to actually support it.
They need to sort out the cue points standard, and someone needs to support it. (No, events fired every X ms or so is not enough)
They need to eliminate cross browser issues with overlaying html over the video stream.
They need to enable adaptive streaming.
They need to do a lot more work, but what has been done so far is very nice.
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What's wrong with the jquery srt plugin [v2v.cc]?
What issues?
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What's wrong with the jquery srt plugin [v2v.cc]?
It ties you down to one javascript framework - its really something that should be provided by the <video> element itself, and handled by the player, not by external javascript. Having to handle subtitles externally is like having to handle the audio separately.
What issues?
I have seen issues where, although rendered above the video stream, links are not clickable, and other issues where components that should be rendered above are infact rendered below the stream.
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did you set your z-indexes properly?
Yes
Did you account for all browsers when you wrote the video tags?
Thats the issue - we have 5 established web browsers today (Opera, Safari, Chrome, Firefox and IE), 4 of which have professed a desire to work closely toward a standard - in this day and age, why should there have to be accommodations made for different browsers when targetting a brand new standard? If the browsers can implement it differently enough that you have to code to the browser rather than the standard, the standard is not strict enough.
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No, it shouldn't. There's a million ways you could do subtitles. There are lots of different formats and there are many ways you could serve up the subtitle content that restricting it to a certain way only limits a developer.
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No, it shouldn't. There's a million ways you could do subtitles. There are lots of different formats and there are many ways you could serve up the subtitle content that restricting it to a certain way only limits a developer.
So its OK to set standards for everything else, except for the things you don't want them to?
I have seen issues where, although rendered above the video stream, links are not clickable, and other issues where components that should be rendered above are infact rendered below the stream.
I haven't experienced any of these issues and it sounds like your z-index is the problem.
Z-indexes are not the cause of the issues I am seeing (why should anything in a container div be in a different z-index to its parent when not set explicitly?)
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If you're just going to make stuff up and argue with things I didn't say in the first place I think we're pretty much done here..
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Got an Education? (Score:5, Informative)
Stupid comment, get an education. If you want to create your own Flash player you can do that. It is OPEN. Stop drinking the Apple Kool Aid without question.
http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/ [gnu.org]
http://flowplayer.org/ [flowplayer.org]
http://www.swift-tools.net/Flash/ [swift-tools.net]
http://www.swftools.com/tools-category.php?cat=968 [swftools.com]
There are also dozens of tools that create Flash apps so you are not restricted to Adobe's tools either.
Re:Got an Education? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Sure, it is open, but if you want the most recent features in acrobat from a free or even paid alternative,
If you want the most recent features of Acrobat, you must be a very rare and special person.
Re:Got an Education? (Score:5, Informative)
90% of the flash content on the web does not need any more than Flash 5-6
[citation needed]
I think youtube alone will barf on anything lower than Flash 8, and they've probably got more than 10% of the "flash content" (well, content that is displayed through flash) on the web right there.
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Hi, I do flash work now and then.
There's your citation. Flash is BLOATED and honestly I STILL USE OLDER VERSIONS for maintaining websites.
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How about this.
YouTube requires Flash 8
Hulu requires Flash 10
I will bet that CNN needs better than 6 but I have not tested it.
If those don't work then you are fubar.
Nothing wrong with asking for something to backup some bonehead statement like 90 of the web only needs Flash 5 or Flash 6!
Even that statement doesn't really fly from the start. Does 90% of the web need Flash 6?
Because if it works on 6 it should work on 5!
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Youtube says it requires flash 8.
Hulu says it requires 10.0.22 (for the newest features including full screen and Higher Res video)
I'm willing to make up a statistic that says if your flash reader doesn't support these sites, it isn't good enough yet.
Am I happy with the state of things? No. But that IS the state of things.
Re:Got an Education? (Score:5, Informative)
While Hulu may require 10.0.22 for the newest features, it requires 10.x just to work at all.
Critical components of Adobe's Flash implementation formerly used by Hulu (RTMPE) were never documented by Adobe, only a reverse engineered specification for RTMPE exists and anyone implementing that specification within the United States will get a DMCA takedown issued by Adobe.
Hulu has since moved to an even more "super-secret" undocumented protocol, most likely with Adobe's cooperation.
So no, Flash is not by any means open, when any attempt to create or distribute a fully compatible alternative within the United States will result in a DMCA takedown notice issued by Adobe.
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Flash 6 was the first version of Flash to support an even remotely usable video codec, and still only supported the incredibly limited ActionScript 1.0.
You're wrong.
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Perhaps it's an issue with your system.
Just because it has issues on your system doesn't mean it doesn't work for everyone else.
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With plugin support in chrome and safari I might leave for good - web kit is really kicking the crap out of gecko right now performance and reliability wise.
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I use Chrome (5.0.375.70 on 64-bit Ubuntu 9.10) and I find it leaks memory like crazy. I do use it for my daily browsing because like you said it's quite fast... but if I leave it running over night, I come back to work the next morning to find it's consumed all free memory on my system and even enough more to push other apps out to swap. The whole system is horribly slow and killing Chrome instantly frees up half of my RAM and puts things back to normal. If I leave it over a weekend, I might as well just h
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Then you don't know how to install it, or you're doing something pretty goddamned weird. I haven't had a problem with the Java plugin in Linux in about eight years.
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I'll bet it's a RAM issue. My experience with Linux is if you're doing EVERYTHING right and you're running from default configs, odds are you've got a hardware issue, and quite often, that ends up being RAM.
Same shit used to happen OFTEN from OSX 10.2.7 up to 10.4 when I worked at Flextronics. Programs would not run - the fix was to replace the RAM and re-image with the default image for that machine..
Committed (Score:5, Funny)
By committed, we mean not really committed at all.
We know that Silverlight is suppoting 64-bit. We know that Microsoft has been pushing 64-bit since 2003. We know all new Windows 7 PCs are coming 64-bit. And we will continue to keep our heads in the sand.
Thanks for your continued patronage.
Re:Committed (Score:5, Interesting)
You are aware that the default browser in 64-bit Windows is 32-bit Internet Explorer?
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Want to know why?
It's because many plugins, such as Flash, don't come in 64-bit flavors.
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Another reason: You don't need a 64-bit address space to run a web browser.
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It isn't just about addressing more than 2 or 4 GB of memory with a single program. In fact, that isn't what 64 bit means. That term "X bit" refers to the the size of the command that a CPU processes at a given per cycle. That is, the maximum registersize used for all math operations, and if done right, the fastest. So large numbers can be dealt with faster. Bench marks show that this only really speeds up computation for a few common computer programs: people doing lots of computations, databases, and
Re:Committed (Score:4, Informative)
Multimedia operations that are be done in a browser process don't usually benefit from working on big numbers, but they do benefit from crunching lots of smaller numbers at one time. That's what these SIMD extensions do, and a "64-bit" architecture isn't necessary for that.
No, but on Intel architectures they do benefit from the fact that in x64 mode, you have twice as many general purpose registers on chip. More registers means that more data can be kept in the CPU at once, reducing cache hits and speeding up all computation.
64-bit compilers for x64 processors can thus better plan register layout. This can make a noticeable difference for all 64-bit applications (beyond the most trivial cases that wouldn't need to use more than 8 general purpose registers in the first place).
Note that this isn't an intrinsic benefit to 64-bit computing, but more a benefit of 64 bit computing on Intel-based architectures, which have traditionally been low on general purpose registers. PowerPC systems, for example, don't benefit from running most apps in 64-bit mode, because the register count between 32 bit and 64 bit is identical (32 GPR, 32 FPR). x64 was a sufficient compatibility break that it was deemed possible to add more registers in this mode (although IMO, they didn't go quite far enough).
Yaz.
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Microsoft has been working hand-in-hand with Moonlight developers so they can produce a GPL Silverlight player for Linux.
Microsoft also puts out development tools for Silverlight on Mac, and an official Mac plug-in.
You aren't being locked into the Windows platform with it.
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It isn't the resource hog the way Flash is, and it doesn't crash as often as Flash.
Microsoft keeps pumping up new versions of Silverlight left and right, but many sites that have Silverlight content are still basiclly just using 2.0.
Last time I checked months ago, Moonlight had most of the 3.0 features down. I wouldn't say they are no where near to releasing it.
Silverlight 4.0 just came out the door. If Moonlight is putting out 3.0 support the second Microsoft gets 4.0 tools into developers hands, that isn'
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How is Adobe locking you into Microsoft when they have players on Linux, Mac, Android, PS3, etc?
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The only problem is that the default browser on most (all?) 64 bit GNU/Linux distributions is 64 bit.
And that you need to install a load of 32-bit libraries just to run a 32-bit web browser when the rest of the OS is 64-bit. I'd rather dump Flash (which I only ever use to watch Youtube videos anyway) than have huge amounts of cruft in my OS just so that it can run.
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We know that Silverlight is suppoting 64-bit. We know that Microsoft has been pushing 64-bit since 2003. We know all new Windows 7 PCs are coming 64-bit. And we will continue to keep our heads in the sand.
To be fair to Microsoft (gasp, yes, even they deserve minimally that), they were planning on making Windows7 x64 only since every chip since 2006 (that was Conroe's launch, many NetBurst supported it as well but not all) supported it. Then Intel came along and released a glorified 486 called Atom which sold like hotcakes (for $40/unit, why wouldn't it -- netbooks are great in their niche) and completely screwed their plans.
The new Atoms support x86_64 and Microsoft has hinted that Windows 8 will be x64 only
Footcannon: aim, fire, reload ... (Score:5, Funny)
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The 64 bit version of Chrome never shipped with flash.
Re:Flash itself supports H.264 (Score:5, Informative)
====* -- Joke
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His point was that the big feature for 10.1 was hardware acceleration for flash (and therefore h264), which Linux doesn't get. Linux gets nothing but downsides from this.
Adobe has one target market: (Score:3, Insightful)
Windows devices.
Is it any wonder that how good Flash for OS X is, Steve banned them from the iP* devices? I don't know how Flash runs on Linux, but on my Mac more than 1-2 youpo^H^H tube videos up in tabs and my fans are maxed out.
Someone in the Linux community needs to step up tell Adobe to shove it like Apple did and start working towards an HTML5 future.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend?
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Exactly. Adobe will support what ever platforms make the most money for Adobe.
That is why they want to be on the iPhone so bad.
But they will always be in control. We must have an open standard for this and now.
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adobe is one of few major software vendors that has consistently kept their software suite going on mac, even through the bad times.
Re:Adobe has one target market: (Score:5, Informative)
IIRC, they considered abandoning the Mac back in the non-Jobs era, but the wailing from their customer base reached even their ears. Had they done so they might have managed to destroy Apple.
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Tell that to Premiere users. Hear the manic laughter.
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And hey, if you want to go down that road, Apple recently criticized Adobe for being late to the game porting their apps to Cocoa. Guess who makes iTunes, which is still stuck in Carbon land?
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Flash Player on OSX has sucked since long before the iPhone, though it has gotten significantly better in that time.
Not losing much... (Score:2)
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Works fine near as I can tell.
Not a problem (Score:2)
I wonder what openSUSE will do (Score:2)
openSUSE has an RPM that pulls in Flash, because they're not allowed to redistribute it directly. What it mainly seems to do is show an EULA and then download and install Flash. I know I've had a couple of updates to it, so it'll be interesting to see what happens if the 10.1 Flash site is disabled.
Oh well, I guess I can manage without Flash. It's not as if the occasional YouTube video is a big loss.
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I don't think they ever used the 64 bit version of flash, they just pulled in the 32 bit version so this shouldn't affect OpenSUSE at all. They always used nsplugginwrapper before for flash on x86_64 (although maybe they've changed this lately).
Like in a Kafka novel... (Score:5, Funny)
I'm not sure whether I should laugh or cry... but it reminds me of reading The Trial :)
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Adobe couldn't pull (Score:3, Insightful)
Beta closed, not flash (Score:2)
The beta is closed, but that doesn't mean Flash 10.1 isn't available for Linux. You can still download it from their site. The closure of the beta could mean anything from 'we're not going to do it' to 'we really messed up and we're writing it from scratch'.
Flash 10 had been working a LOT better than previous versions for me, so at least we aren't stuck with the old flash 7 or 8 crap.
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Except the 64-bit beta version almost certainly has a remote code execution vulnerability that's unlikely to ever be fixed now there's no new releases. In fact, it looks like not wanting to put in the effort to fix it is why they terminated the program, judging from the timing.
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> Flash 10 had been working a LOT better than previous versions for me...
That's the explanation, then. The quality got out of control and exceeded their standards. Nothing to do but kill it.
Poor Adobe... (Score:4, Insightful)
They took their sweet time porting their "cross platform" plugin to Linux, and in the meantime, we were stuck with the barely functioning (although I do not fault them for the effort) GNU implementation. Cross platform to Adobe means: Windows 7, Windows Vitsa, Windows XP, and Mac OS. Personally, I pine for the day that HTML 5 is able to displace Flash, and therefore Adobe, permanently. In my opinion, they have squandered any goodwill towards the open source community. I'll be the first one in line to dance on their grave.
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Disagree. Adobe's work in porting Flash to Linux has made the Linux browsing experience as similar to the Windows one as we would ever wish it to be. Adobe has made Linux more usable, because most websites now "just work" on Linux, even when they rely on Flash.
Linux users such as myself (13+ years of desktop use) cannot expect the rest of the world to give up Flash just because it's a non-free application. Someday, HTML5 and Javascript may be so much better than Flash that the switchover occurs naturally,
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Cross platform to Adobe means: Windows 7, Windows Vitsa, Windows XP, and Mac OS.
For their CS suite, yes. For the Flash player, MacOS isn't *much* better off than Linux. The Flash player on OSX stinks. Not only is performance bad, but it crashes constantly.
On the bright side, Apple includes a nice quick PDF viewer, so at least you don't need to install Acrobat Reader.
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I'll be the first one in line to dance on their grave.
I think Linus already shotgunned the grave dancing back when he was struggling with youtube on his wife's Fedora install [redhat.com].
Nessus Web Interface (Score:2)
The Nessus web interface is done in flash and fairly nice. Is there an alternative for the command-line challenged?
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You are a security analyst who is afraid of the command line? Really??
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No, sorry. :-)
I've created some click-n-run templates that generate reports management demands on seeing. THEY are command-line challenged. My stuff is already 90% automated.
I'm confused (Score:2, Interesting)
Just installed 64bit Ubuntu on an older HP Laptop (Score:2)
On this Celeron based machine Flash is unwatchable with 32bit Linux as well as 64bit. HTML5 streamed video on the other hand, when watched with a beta Chrome build that supports it ,gives me a passable viewing experience (although you still get immediate frame-dragging if the machine has any additional load).
More than video (Score:2)
The problem I have with this is that, in my organizaiton, Flash is actually used for some of the administrative web services within the company. Many of my users (including me!) only have one computer, and it's a 64-bit Linux workstation. We also have a security rule that says we're supposed to patch vulnerabilities, and if a patch is not availble for a known-vulnerable application, we're supposed to remove it.
So all these rules interact and add up to "some users can no longer use some administrative web s
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Why not just host a browser on a Windows box and serve the applications through Citrix? (It works not unlike X remotely, where the end user experience is roughly like if the application was running locally). Thats what we did at my previous company when stuff was incompatible with user workstations.
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Because Citrix is a slow piece of shit. Having had to deal with it at Solectron, Kroger's, and other places, I've learned to stay FAR the hell away from that piece of garbage.
Instructions and download of latest flash 64-bit (Score:2, Interesting)
Can be found here: http://nxadm.wordpress.com/2009/04/26/install-64-bit-adobe-flash-player-on-ubuntu-904/ (with md5 of the file, up to date with Ubuntu 10.04 and other distributions).
This guy made it possible for me to convert all my linux installs to 64-bit.
nspluginwrapper (Score:5, Informative)
I think it's worth pointing out that Ubuntu's repositories have always used 32-bit flash + nspluginwrapper even while 64-bit flash was available. I've never found either of these solutions to be particularly stable, but this doesn't mean 64-bit Linux is going without flash completely.
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Indeed, nspluginwrapper is the only good way to run flash on any word size. Why would you want to run Flash in-process, regardless of 32/64 compatibility? nspluginwrapper makes the sun shine and the birds sing and the grass grow. It's awesome.
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Ok that's not quite true. Firefox has a very slow memory leak, and it needs to be restarted about once a month. That could be caused by the flash plugin i guess.
New "feature" in 10.1: DRM (Score:5, Interesting)
There is a new clause in the Flash 10.1 EULA [adobe.com] that was not present in 10.0 [adobe.com]:
You have to download a 3.3 MB PDF with 280 pages to find this kind of stuff. There's no telling how far these updates will go (remember TurboTax DRM [slashdot.org]?).
Dynamic recompilation (Score:3, Insightful)
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Those are "excuses", not reasons. We are talking about Adobe, a large software company that can actually write software. They are supposed to fix things like this BEFORE stepping out onto a new platform.
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A "size_t" is NOT the same as an "unsigned int".
If you think it is, you're ignorant.
But 64-bit Flash has been working fine in 10.0; they've only dropped it now they've switched to 10.1, implying that they've actively broken something that used to work.
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Yeah, cutting out that 1% or so of potential users will really crush their userbase....
(http://marketshare.hitslink.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=10)
SWF has been open for two years (Score:2)
It's a good thing that this is not available because it'll encourage people to use proper, open formats, and not closed, proprietary, barely-known-about-by-half-the-population formats
SWF (apart from the video codecs) has been open for two years, since Adobe lifted the ban on third-part players as part of the Open Screen Project.
WebM is supported in nightly builds of most popular browsers
The most common browser (49 percent is still a plurality) doesn't support WebM yet. And it won't unless your administrator allows you to install Google Chrome Frame, a version of Google Chrome wrapped up in an IE browser helper object. Nor does WebM support vector animation like that used for Homestar Runner.
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Why PAE works in Linux and Mac (Score:2)