Debian Administration

I use Flash 9 - available on Linux!
http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer9.html

Tried gnash and it didn't work, if it worked maybe I'd use it.

Can't use Adobe Flash as there isn't an AMD64 port.

On the whole, as a web developer, I hate flash as it mostly makes sites less usable. Now and then people use it well, but for most cases they use it to abuse their visitors...

--
"It's Not Magic, It's Work"
Adam

i use adobe's plugin as well. but i hate it. It causes more instability in my firefox^W^W^W^W^W^W^Wiceweasel instances than any other plugin or extension i use. It does weird things to the keyboard/mouse focus, and it behaves goofily with my sound card.

Anyway, i run it behind flashblock, so most often it doesn't get used at all. I'd love to switch to gnash, but i haven't had a chance to spend time evaluating it recently.

I agree with Adam's remarks about flash making the web less usable, too. There's a reason they call them "skip intro"s. Ugh.

Didn't they recently open select parts of the flash player? I think they'll come around, eventually. Personally, I don't boycott non-free stuff, especially if it runs on linux, because I think open source is a better development model. As such, companies will either come around to it or fall by the wayside. I mean, if you refuse to use flash player on principle, does that hurt adobe? Not really. But if there is a large number of linux users for flash that get vocal when adobe doesn't keep up development on the linux side, they'll have to spend a lot of time keeping up with this nonfree plugin, or else just open the spec and let the community develop an open source plugin for them. To me the latter would make more sense, as long as they can work out the legal side.

I only watch some YouTube videos ocasionally, but youtube-dl + vlc works fine (and it's free! ;).

Flash is the language with the most potential to change the face of the web today. The lack of a free (preferably GPL or BSD licensed) runtime completely decimates its ability to become a widely accepted standard. The sort of functionality achievable with Flash makes Web 2.0 look like a joke in comparison.

XUL was another potential competitor but it has languished for years, as far as I can tell it has no momentum behind it. That's a shame, you can do some beautiful work with it.

In the interest of full disclosure I have to admit that I don't do web work at all. I'm a research scientest and all my code is released under the GPL (or public domain). R is my main development language.

Flash is cool, but it's corporate. Sometimes corporate forgets that cash and customer are twice king'd. So fsck it already and write something better. Or did you? TIA cruel world.

May the dope post a renig? How 'bout someone(ses) CHANGED my MIND. What is COMMON sense?

Absolutely agree with comment #4, and Flashblock does the trick for me too.

The new Flashplayer 9 is making things much worse; workarounds ain't working. And the new system requirements mean many otherwise adequate boxes, like this one, won't be able to run flash:

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer9/releasenotes.html #sysreq

-- quote --
Hardware - Adobe has tested the Flash Player 9 Update beta for Linux extensively on the following minimum hardware configurations:

* Modern Processor (at least 800 MHz)
* 512MB of RAM
* Alsa Sound Architecture (OSS/ESD will not play audio; audio will silently fail.)
* Graphics Memory (128MB)
-- end quote --

I hate flash! It's a system hog and hides information. Having an interactive music and video player on a page is nice, but those "lasso the bull and get a free ipod!" advertisements aren't. Also disliked are the ads that play a sound or expand to take up the whole page when you roll over them. I didn't want to roll over you, I just wanted to get to the content I desire.