The Open-Source Community Is Still Maintaining Flash Player Support In 2024

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The Open-Source Community Is Still Maintaining Flash Player Support In 2024

There seems to be two classes of people when reminiscing over Adobe Flash: those that were fond of Flash-games of the time from many years ago and those that cringe over recalling Flash ads and other content requiring that prior proprietary Macromedia/Adobe tech. For those that have good memories from Adobe Flash, the Ruffle open-source project continues working to this day on an Adobe Flash Player emulator...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Adobe-Flash-Ruffle-2024

[avis]

Flash as a standard/format was never as bad as it was portrayed, it was cool and offered the performance and features which HTML5 web browsers started to provide at least a decade later while using a ton more RAM/CPU resources (literally tenfold). Had Adobe open sourced the player and made Flash an ISO standard, I guess it could have lived on quite successfully. Too bad they just wrote it off.

It's nice to see people keeping Flash alive.

[Quackdoc]

ruffle is great, janky, but great, still lacking some stuff, but overall it can play most games

[vextium]

in rust btw ;3

[Volta]

Had Adobe open sourced the player and made Flash an ISO standard, I guess it could have lived on quite successfully. Too bad they just wrote it off.

Flash was always a nightmare on Linux. It was also terrible from security standpoint. I bet the main reason Adobe didn't want to make it Open Source was the fear of revealing their incompetence.

[Danniello]

Had Adobe open sourced the player and made Flash an ISO standard, I guess it could have lived on quite successfully. Too bad they just wrote it off.

My guess are licenses. Adobe Flash probably it is frankenstein of many third-party libraries/applications/patents/etc. The same story is with Windows - Microsoft cannot open-source it even if they would like to do it.

[Sonadow]

Flash as a standard/format was never as bad as it was portrayed, it was cool and offered the performance and features which HTML5 web browsers started to provide at least a decade later while using a ton more RAM/CPU resources (literally tenfold). Had Adobe open sourced the player and made Flash an ISO standard, I guess it could have lived on quite successfully. Too bad they just wrote it off.

It's nice to see people keeping Flash alive.

Flash also had its own embedded fonts and media codecs which made it immediately usable on any platform it supported, while looking and presenting its content in exactly the way content designers made it to be across all platforms. HTML5 is a complete joke in that regard when compared to Flash.

If you had Flash installed in your computer, you can play any Flash content, period. No need for having to fight with missing codecs or shit, unlike the issue with HTML5 and h264/h265 where certain distributions still refuse to provide proper support for these codecs over various stupid reasons.

Also, Flash had its own form of content protection. Where it's so easy to right click an online video today to "Save Video As", right clicking Flash content basically returned nothing.

This presentation consistency is the sole reason Flash is still semi-officially maintained in China. Content designers didn't have to bother if certain Chinese fonts were installed in a user's computer or not; Flash and its embedded fonts is that common ground.

Flash only failed because the tech illiterates bought into Steve Jobs' bunk.

[spicfoo]

If you had Flash installed in your computer, you can play any Flash content, period. No need for having to fight with missing codecs or shit, unlike the issue with HTML5 and h264/h265 where certain distributions still refuse to provide proper support for these codecs over various stupid reasons.

Patent cartels enforce media patents extremely aggressively. Distributions are wise to avoid that litigation especially when Linux users won't ever pay for the codecs.

Flash only failed because the tech illiterates bought into Steve Jobs' bunk.

Steve Jobs didn't cause awful security bugs that constantly plagued Flash like the one that exposed your webcam to everyone without your permission.

[andre30correia]

people defending flash? always crashing, never work as expect, horrible to make app, the 3d or hw never really worked, in linux was plague, the best thing who happen was the end of such software

[flower]

people defending flash? always crashing, never work as expect, horrible to make app, the 3d or hw never really worked, in linux was plague, the best thing who happen was the end of such software

you are talking about the implmentation from adobe. which always sucked.
the format itself wasnt bad. esp at that time