[arch-general] [arch-dev-public] dropping flashplugin x86_64

[Philipp Überbacher]

Excerpts from Caleb Cushing's message of 2010-06-17 11:28:48 +0200:
> On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 3:59 AM, Philipp Überbacher
> <hollunder at lavabit.com> wrote:
> > Flash or some players seem to still be buggy. I recently booted a live
> > CD to watch a long video, and at some point, out of the blue, it was
> > simply impossible to seek forward or backward. The Volume controls did
> > nothing at all. Hurray for flash video?
> 
> that's you're example? I've had livecd's become useless run
> environments due to IO problems... tell me your test was at least a
> livecd environment loaded completely into ram.

I have no idea, it was simply the latest ubuntu live CD, i386 I believe.
I never claimed that it was scientific, just recent experience. I used a
live CD for this because I didn't want to install flash, but now I
couldn't install it if I wanted to (practically I could, but it would be
insane). 
The whole thing is a great example why we should avoid proprietary
technologies. First we're used as a testbed, then dropped. It shows how
much you're at the companies mercy. That alone is reason enough for me
to not use stuff like flash or skype.

> > Have you tried that asteroids game linked in an earlier post in this
> > thread? IMHO it works surprisingly well.
> 
> no. don't do games much anymore. I personally don't care about them. I
> have seen several decent js examples of games and canvas and whatever.
> But I do believe in this stuff needing to be supported across all
> major vendors before it's ready. It's not supported yet. I hate IE,
> and I might leave 'features out' of my IE support but I think that
> even IE users should be able to access my content. The reason I
> believe this is I know how many site's screwed us for years (and still
> are). I don't want to be screwed and I'm not screwing anyone else.

It wasn't about the game, but more about how well it runs. I was
surprised to say the least. It kind of defeats the 'flash is much more
than video' argument. Same is probably true for that wikipedia video
page I linked somewhere, it has well working controls, very similar to
those of flash players.

I've no idea about how well it is supported across browsers, only tried
FF. I agree that it should work across all browsers and also all
platforms (not sure flash does ppc and stuff). It might or might not
work in some alternative browsers, but they sadly still have plenty of
issues anyway. IE however will have to catch up in reasonable time if
it lags behind other major browsers. From what I remember, they said
they'll support webm, if only as codec you need to install separately.
Proper html5 and js support will have to happen too.

So maybe it's not all there yet, and flash isn't dead yet, but I think
(and hope) it won't take very long.
-- 
Regards,
Philipp

--
"Wir stehen selbst enttäuscht und sehn betroffen / Den Vorhang zu und alle Fragen offen." Bertolt Brecht, Der gute Mensch von Sezuan