Saturday, March 08, 2008 5:41 PM
by
loufranco
Flash on Linux
Not to keep dumping on Flash, but these stories keep popping up:
I recently upgraded from Kubuntu Feisty to Gutsy, and all went well apart from one thing. Konqueror began putting up a crash dialog everytime it accessed a site with Flash, making it pretty much unusable. [...]
Until this experience I had a very high regard for Adobe, technologies like PDF and Postscript are excellent and also well documented to allow for alternative implementations. In contrast Flash doesn't work well, and doesn't have an open specification, and not only that, but they are about the add DRM, digital restrictions management to it. I have no problem with Adobe selling proprietary technology as long as they don't attempt to privatise public infrastructure like the web. I think it is very important to avoid AIR as it is based on the same dodgy proprietary foundations as Flash. Something like Qt with Javascript bindings (or QtRuby even) combined with WebKit can probably do everything you can do in AIR in the way of writing stand alone 'webby' apps. And Plasma also allows you to integrate the desktop better via widgets, which Air doesn't do.
It's not a big deal until you start factoring in that some new PC alternatives like the Asus and the OLPC are built on Linux -- the other day, someone was showing me the cool new Nokia tablet built on Linux.
Anyway, for multimedia on the web, there really isn't a viable alternative yet (at least until Silverlight is everywhere), so it's a shame to see two device platforms (iPhone and anything Linux) without a good implementation. Perhaps things will change regarding Linux since Moonlight is a first class citizen in the Silverlight ecosystem.