Firefox/NPAPI/Flash discussion for UDS

[Bryan Quigley]

Hi Chris,

The "do nothing" plan in this case would result in features being
taken away during the primetime* life of the 16.04 LTS.  If we
knowingly can't support them for even 2 years (likely more like 1
year), should the LTS include them at all?

1- Minimal option:
Just mention that the support will drop in the release notes, follow
Firefox's lead for alerting users.
Stop installing Flash in the Ubuntu installer

2 - Slightly more aggressive than Mozilla:
Turn on click-to-play ahead of Mozilla

3- Aggressive option:
Disable NPAPI for 16.04.

Obviously, we can separate NPAPI vs Flash-NPAPI if we want in the above.

I would rather users realize they also need Chromium/Chrome in their
environments when they first install 16.04 rather than a random number
of months later.  If we don't at least do 1 we're just asking for
trouble,   I think doing number 3 for general NPAPI isn't that out of
the question.

>most sites that use Flash continue to work fine with the exception of things like Amazon Video
I'm guessing most users have switched to Google Chrome for them.  Many
sites that don't need DRM don't use Flash anymore anyway.

I'll see if I can get a better answer for Adobe. Obviously EOY 2017 is
very different than February 2017.

Kind regards,
Bryan

*First two years, until the next LTS is released.

On Mon, Oct 19, 2015 at 12:18 PM, Chris Coulson
<chrisccoulson at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> 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 10 months after release Flash is no longer maintained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
>
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