# future of flash in FreeBSD



## estex198 (Oct 30, 2012)

So I recently became aware of this (copied directly from Adobe's download page for Flash...)

NOTE: Adobe Flash Player 11.2 will be the last version to target Linux as a supported platform. Adobe will continue to provide security backports to Flash Player 11.2 for Linux.

What does this mean for FreeBSD? I know Google Chrome includes Flash and will continue to be available to Linux users, but what are the options for FreeBSD now and later?


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## SirDice (Oct 30, 2012)

I'm hoping flash died a slow and painful death by that time.


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## Monoecus (Oct 30, 2012)

Agree. I think Flash will be obsoleted by HTML5 soon. So, don't worry too much.


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## estex198 (Oct 30, 2012)

Well in the meantime has anyone had success using Google Chrome under wine in FreeBSD?


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## Hawk (Oct 30, 2012)

Firefox will work on wine. That's usually what I use to circumvent the flash issue.


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## cbrace (Oct 30, 2012)

SirDice said:
			
		

> I'm hoping flash died a slow and painful death by that time.


Amen.


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## drhowarddrfine (Oct 30, 2012)

Adobe is refocusing its efforts on HTML5 and has stopped development of Flash for mobile. Stopping Flash for mobile is a serious indicator of its future since mobile is the new desktop.


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## kpedersen (Oct 30, 2012)

Flash is running in chrome using the platform agnostic Pepper API.

Afaik, it is quite possible to grab the flash plugin from Chrome and put it in the FreeBSD Chromium.


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## pkubaj (Oct 30, 2012)

Flash is still being developed for Linux using Pepper API. Chrome for Linux has Flash Player 11.4.


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## zspider (Nov 13, 2012)

Youtube has partial HTML5, I just wish they would apply it entirely, because it works very well.


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## Beastie (Nov 13, 2012)

Many websites have already made the transition to something else. Mobile devices are starting to replace computers and Flash support on them is either very buggy or inexistent.
The biggest Flash content provider nowadays is probably YouTube. If they really decided to kill Flash it would already be dead :\


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## drhowarddrfine (Nov 13, 2012)

Beastie said:
			
		

> Many websites have already made the transition to something else.


My little company has five theatre web sites that are heavily populated with video. None of them use Flash at all.


> Mobile devices are starting to replace computers and Flash support on them is either very buggy or inexistent.


Adobe has ceased development for Flash on mobile. I link to that above.


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## break19 (Nov 13, 2012)

I just wish the sites that have the little flash games would all switch to something else as well.  My daughter has serious problems trying to play her flash-driven games from nickjr.com - chromium + nspluginwrapper + linux flash works OK.. except sometimes she cant get the arrow keys to work in certain games.  Firefox instead of chromium, the keys all work, but certain games manage to crash the flashplayer, which on firefox means crashing the browser.. and sometimes locks up the entire box.

Opera is no better than firefox... I even tried using the pepper plugin, following some sites I found to use it on chromium in linux.. but it wouldn't load the plugin. Chromium -detected- the plugin, but all I could get was a black box with text that says "Unable to load plugin".  I guess my next option is firefox in wine....


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## neowolf (Nov 14, 2012)

Firefox in WINE, or perhaps the official Linux build of Google Chrome? Though I'd avoid both of thus until it was just unfeasible to run the existing plugin in nspluginwrapper myself.


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## UNIXgod (Nov 14, 2012)

estex198 said:
			
		

> So I recently became aware of this (copied directly from Adobe's download page for Flash...)
> 
> NOTE: Adobe Flash Player 11.2 will be the last version to target Linux as a supported platform. Adobe will continue to provide security backports to Flash Player 11.2 for Linux.
> 
> What does this mean for FreeBSD? I know Google Chrome includes Flash and will continue to be available to Linux users, but what are the options for FreeBSD now and later?



Flash will eventually be userped by html5 multimedia tags. As for security one way to deal with the here and now is to remove the .adobe and .macromedia directories and replace them with links to /dev/null


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## volatilevoid (May 31, 2013)

I know how horrible Flash is but would running a Linux version (God forbid!) of Chromium work on FreeBSD? I tried out the combination of the FreeBSD port www/chromium and the Linux PepperFlash plugin but that doesn't work too well as the Linux ABI support layer isn't running as Chromium is a native FreeBSD ELF binary but the plugin isn't. I got as far as getting a 
	
	



```
version GLIBC_2.2.5 required
```
 error message while loading the module which is a dead end as there is of course no glibc on FreeBSD and the Linux version obviously doesn't work. Otherwise I'll stick to Flash 11.2 but there are already web sites which don't work with 11.2 anymore (tsk-tsk!).


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## drhowarddrfine (May 31, 2013)

Why would you want to run the Linux version? Chromium and Flash work well together.


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## kpedersen (May 31, 2013)

Flash has been ported to the Chrome NaCl API. However Chromium does not provide this port. It is my understanding you can copy it across and use pretty much an official version of flash on FreeBSD.


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## volatilevoid (Jun 1, 2013)

drhowarddrfine said:
			
		

> Why would you want to run the Linux version? Chromium and Flash work well together.


As far as I know only with Flash 11.2 or does it already work with 11.7? I know that it works with www/linux-f10-flashplugin11 but that port won't be updated beyond 11.2 as Adobe stopped the official Linux support except for security updates.



			
				kpedersen said:
			
		

> Flash has been ported to the Chrome NaCl API. However Chromium does not provide this port. It is my understanding you can copy it across and use pretty much an official version of flash on FreeBSD.


That's what I tried. I used the PepperFlash plugin from the Chrome Debian 64-bit version with the result showed in my earlier post.  Do you know how to make it work?


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## phoenix (Jun 2, 2013)

Have you tried running the Linux version of Google Chrome on FreeBSD with the Linux version of the Pepper Flash plugin? Or the Linux version of Chromium?


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## volatilevoid (Jun 3, 2013)

Hello @phoenix,



			
				phoenix said:
			
		

> Have you tried running the Linux version of Google Chrome on FreeBSD with the Linux version of the Pepper Flash plugin? Or the Linux version of Chromium?


No, not yet. Do they work out of the box with the linuxulator?

I'd prefer the Linux version of Chromium with the PepperFlash plugin from Chrome which seems to work flawlessly under Linux. I guess for a FreeBSD Chromium version to work with the Linux plugin a PPAPI variant of www/nspluginwrapper would be necessary (that would be my favorite combination)?

Bests
Thomas


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## phoenix (Jun 4, 2013)

No idea, I don't use either browser on any OS.


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## jozze (Jun 27, 2013)

As many have already said, I also think (and hope) that _F_lash will be replaced by HTML5, because _F_lash in itself is "spyware" and is sending your information to others.


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## Chris_H (Jul 15, 2013)

SirDice said:
			
		

> I'm hoping flash died a slow and painful death by that time.





			
				cbrace said:
			
		

> amen.





			
				jozze said:
			
		

> As many have already said, I also think (and hope) that _F_lash will be replaced by HTML5, because _F_lash in itself is "spyware" and is sending your information to others.


 *+1*
Flash must die.


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## Jellicent (Jul 16, 2013)

I hope as many here that *F*lash will lose the battle against HTML5. Jeez, do us a favour here...


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## lme@ (Jul 21, 2013)

Actually I am quite happy with Flash at the moment. I'm running 10-CURRENT with NEW_XORG and KMS on a notebook with an Intel GM45 graphics chipset and all HTML5 content is slow as hell. On YouTube I switched back to Flash and I cannot use the new Google Maps, because it eats up the CPU no matter if I use Chromium or Firefox.


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## sulman (Sep 6, 2013)

lme@ said:
			
		

> Actually I am quite happy with Flash at the moment. I'm running 10-CURRENT with NEW_XORG and KMS on a notebook with an Intel GM45 graphics chipset and all HTML5 content is slow as hell. On YouTube I switched back to Flash and I cannot use the new Google Maps, because it eats up the CPU no matter if I use Chromium or Firefox.



That's not just your rig. The new Google Maps isn't a great performer even on a very decent Macbook Pro.


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## volatilevoid (Oct 15, 2013)

I played around a bit with the Linux version of Chromium but had no luck so far. I first tried patching /compat/linux/lib and /compat/linux/usr/lib with newer versions of the Fedora libraries which basically bricked my linuxulator. :e

My next try was to use a Debian i386 chroot environment (based on wheezy) which worked out pretty well. I was able to run Iceweasel on my FreeBSD box but Chromium still refuses to work. On start-up, it does some funny stuff with user privileges (in the function DropRoot in sandbox.c) and on the console, I can see the linuxulator complaining about prlimit64 not being implemented so I guess I'm pretty much out of luck there. Maybe it's better to wait for a Firefox nightly with Shumway... :OOO


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## volatilevoid (Jan 25, 2014)

To finally close this topic: Linux Chromium uses features from (lin)procfs which are not supported (not even in CURRENT). So the solution is to either stick to Flash 11.2 or to use a Linux VM. Firefox/Iceweasel works fine in a Debian chroot jail though - but then you could also use the port.


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