Unfortunately, many of the same things that make the official Flash plugin crash-prone also make the plugin difficult to replace - namely that the Flash specification is incredibly complex, with numerous APIs that change between releases of the official Flash platform. Or to put it another way, although your LUG and your favorite distro probably do not use Flash on their sites, your local farmer’s market or Wild West reenactor troupe, sadly, might. But the further you stray from the bleeding edge of technology, the more likely you are to find a site built with Flash interactivity and navigation, from the dark days before DHTML and DOM scripting. If you do have kids, however, you likely see Flash games and interactive content all the time (perhaps even too often for your liking…), and for you, simply ignoring Flash is not a real option.įinally, if you spend the bulk of your online time at tech-heavy Web sites (as many Linux users do), you probably see modern HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. There are video extraction tools and extensions to pull video right out of Flash wrappers at the click of a button, allowing you to forget it ever existed. If you are an adult without kids, you may generally encounter Flash only in its use as a cross-platform video delivery mechanism, and in many ways this is the easiest usage of Flash to dispense with. You may wonder why you need Flash support at all. You can, with a little bit of time and preparation, this weekend.

And to all that the fact that it is a proprietary, binary-only blob, and you can see why many Linux desktop users want to free themselves from it. Flash is available only for 32-bit Intel-compatible processor architectures, and it has long been a source of browser slowdowns, freezes, and crashes. The official browser plugin offered by Adobe has tended to lag behind releases for other platforms. Linux users have never been well-served by Flash.

Flash player alternatives to adobe