Linux power users can never forget the fact that Adobe ditched its native support for Flash Player. But after four years of its absence, Adobe Flash is now formally debuting on the open source platform.
Technology evolved in the recent past, and users moved on to HTML5. All major websites and video players replaced Flash with HTML5. It has been almost a year since Flash has become good as dormant across all the computing platforms. All modern web browsers come with HTML5 by default. Linux users do not even remember what Flash is.
But Flash is now apparently getting into a new phase. Thus, it is making way to Linux users through a new NPAPI build.
“In the past, we communicated that NPAPI Linux releases would stop in 2017,” wrote Chris Campbell, product manager and advocate for the Adobe Flash Runtime team, in a blog post. “This is no longer the case, and once we have performed sufficient testing and received community feedback, we will release both NPAPI and PPAPI Linux builds with their major version numbers in sync and on a regular basis.”
The beta version of the NPAPI Flash is initially available for select Linux platform. Though the testing version might have some bugs, its final version is touted to be as sophisticated as Windows and Mac versions.
Most of Linux users are not likely to be taking care about this recent announcement by Adobe. However, this appears to be good news for developers that require Flash for special projects.
Both 64-bit and 32-bit beta versions of the new NPAPI build can run Flash content on your Linux system. But the initial release does not support Fedora-based distributions.
