Firefox/NPAPI/Flash discussion for UDS

[Chris Coulson]

On 12/10/15 20:39, Bryan Quigley wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Mozilla has announced their plan to drop NPAPI support for everything
> but Flash at the end of 2016[1].  That got me thinking that we might
> have to drop it sooner than that for 16.04 LTS [2] - which is what
> happened fro Chromium for 14.04 LTS.   Flash (NPAPI Linux) is also
> possibly going EOL for Firefox in February 2017 which might be good to
> talk about again as well.
>
> We previously talked about Flash and NPAPI last November [3][4].  We
> didn't believe at the time that Ubuntu alone had the pull to greatly
> change Flash use, and I don't think that's changed.
>
> If we do nothing for 16.04 LTS, then for Firefox:
> 8 months after released all plugins (aside from flash) stop working
> 10 months after release Flash is no longer maintained
>
> Flash 11.2 has also become less useful thanks to dependencies on hal
> [5] which is longer in Ubuntu, so many sites just don't work.  Also
> getting them to drop gtk2 should make it easier to maintain Firefox.
> These are really only relevant if we can get Adobe to commit to
> support Flash 11.2 for longer.
>
> I'm happy to ask upstream if we can have some people from Mozilla join
> us in a UDS session too, but it makes sense to hash this out a bit
> here first.
>
> Thanks!
> Bryan
>
> [1] https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2015/10/08/npapi-plugins-in-firefox/
> [2] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.tech.plugins/sdLQgvG84uM
> [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZCVuy4ugDc
> [4] http://pad.ubuntu.com/ep/pad/view/uos-1411-adobe-flash-on-firefoxlinux-eol/4MgjOcm3Oc
> [5] http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2013/10/fixing-amazon-prime-streaming-drm-protected-flash-13-10?utm_source=feedly
>

Hi,

I didn't feel that the session last time was all that useful - it
basically acknowledged that Flash on Linux is going EOL and that there
isn't much we can do about it. What has changed since then and what sort
of outcome are you looking for that would make an UOS session worthwhile
for this?

AFAICT, the outcome at the end of any session will be the same: Mozilla
will still be planning to drop support for non-Flash NPAPI plugins
sometime next year, they still won't have any plans to support PPAPI
plugins, they'll still be investing in Shumway, Adobe will still be
planning to stop providing updates to Flash 11.2 based on some
non-public timetable (but we expect it to be sometime in 2017), and we
will keep distributing Flash 11.2 via the partner archive to all Ubuntu
releases for as long as it's supported.

I wouldn't expect Adobe to spend time porting a piece of software that
they've deprecated and are only providing security fixes for to newer
technologies (eg, gtk3, away from HAL). Speaking as the Firefox
maintainer, the current plugin really doesn't cause any problems for
Firefox maintenance at the distro level (there might be some burden
upstream, but Flash already works fine in gtk3 Firefox). And I think
you're over-exaggerating the impact of not having DRM support (because
of the HAL dependency) - most sites that use Flash continue to work fine
with the exception of things like Amazon Video, which haven't worked out
of the box on Ubuntu since we dropped HAL from the default install
(IIRC, sometime around 2010). If there really was a big demand for this,
we'd have fixed it 5 years ago. I even wrote a wrapper to make it work,
but there wasn't much interest in it
(https://code.launchpad.net/~chrisccoulson/+junk/flash-hal-helper).

Regards
- Chris