flash

Beta version of Flash 10

Today Adobe released a beta version of Flash 10, from the realease notes:

“Ubuntu OS Support — Flash Player 10 now supports Ubuntu, one of the most popular flavors of Linux.”

  1. “Ubuntu OS”? :)
  2. Previous versions of Flash already work on Ubuntu
  3. How can you say that you support a .deb-based distro if you only release a .tar.gz and a .rpm?

The bad news is that it crashes both WebKit GTK and QtWebKit. This is a perfect example of why I don’t like closed source software, it isn’t because of political reasons but because interoperability with it is hard: you don’t have any simple way to understand what it’s wrong and it’s impossible to fix it.

Plugin support for WebKit GTK / Qt

A picture is worth a thousand words:

YouTube video in WebKit GTK
Flash plugin in the WebKit GTK demo application

YouTube video in QtWebKit
Flash plugin in the WebKit Qt demo application

Since a few hours ago both WebKit GTK and Qt support plugins! Thanks to everyone who worked on this, in particular to Rodney Dawes (who wrote the original patch in the past months) and to Marc Ordinas i Llopis (who maintained the patch and worked on the Qt port, and who recently joined us at Collabora). A thank you also to Alp Toker and Simon Hausmann who reviewed the patch.

Update: See also Marc’s blog for details.