On Friday 06 Apr 2012 08:24:57 C wrote:
On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 08:11, Graham Anderson
wrote: I would like to ask your thoughts on how we use and offer the flash plugin.
Clearly Adobe are no longer willing to support Linux as an OS. Persuant to this I propose we drop the flash plugin option entirely; by this I mean that none of our installation options should suggest flash plugin.
Furthermore, I think that flash plugin should not be offered as an additional repository or installation option.
The problem with that is that a vast portion of the web relies on Flash, and I'm not talking about YouTube here. If we decide to drop Flash altogether, then we had better come up with an alternative for Flash that ensures that websites continue working.
That "vast" portion of the web that relies on flash also usually relies on IE6 or IE7, all of these three techs are in decline and none of them should be indirectly supported by openSUSE. <video> is available on many youtube channels now, any new vid uploaded will be available via <video>
Ignoring the big ones like YouTube, there are many other sites that rely on Flash - uTest for example is a 100% Flash based site, and there are loads of others out there that simply will not work without Flash.
100% flash sites should live or die on their own sword. Any argument to support them in the context of openSUSE is fundamentally flawed. Any site that is 100% flash should rely on their own proprietary tech. Flash is not an open standard and actionscript is maintained outside of accepable norms.
You can say, I suppose, use Google Chrome for all Flash based websites (they roll in Flash with the browser).... will this work? Is this an acceptable alternative? If yes, then Chrome needs to be in the default install if Flash is dropped... in place of Firefox?
Just drop flash entirely, all our packaged browsers support <video> and <audio>
What about standalone applications that rely on Flash? How do we deal with those?
Let them die.
Are the open source Flash implementations "good enough" to be drop in replacements?
No, they are terrible and flash/actionscript are not open standards.