Adobe Flash in Linux
Flashed
© Lead Image © James Steidl, fotolia.com
PPAPI, NPAPI, Pepper Flash, Fresh Player – just a lot of gibberish? We check out the background of Flash in Linux and provide tips on how to rule out the worst bugs in the technology.
Adobe Flash may be becoming less and less important with the rise of HTML5, but the much-maligned plugin is still the most widely installed browser add-on in the computer world. Hardly a web browser operates without Flash, even in the Linux world.
The latest developments in Flash are causing a considerable amount of confusion. In this article, I describe some recent changes across the Flash landscape and give some tips on setting up Flash on a Linux system.
Peppered
Adobe completely discontinued the development of standalone Flash plugins for Linux in February 2012 [1]; however, they still support a plugin for Google's Native Client (NaCL) technology, which uses the Pepper Plugin API (PPAPI) [2]. Adobe supplies only the bare essential security updates for the legacy plugin with the Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface (NPAPI).
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