Thread: Adobe Flash
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Old August 10th 18, 10:39 PM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
VanguardLH[_2_]
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Default Adobe Flash

Tim wrote:

While upgrading Flash today, I found that I have both Flash Player 30 NPAPI
and Flash Player 30 PPPAPI. What is the difference between the two, and do

^^^___ one too many P's
I need both?

I suspect that one is a developer version, and the other a run-time, but
what do I know.


PPAPI is Google's Pepper Flash; see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPAPI#PPAPI

Although you never mentioned which web browsers you installed, you have
Google Chrome or a variant thereof to have Pepper Flash along with
Firefox or a variant thereof to have the NPAPI Flash plug-in. Although
Mozilla removed all NPAPI support in Firefox as of version 52, they
still support their own embedded Flash NPAPI plugin. However, Mozilla
will migrate to Pepper Flash; see:

https://www.infoworld.com/article/31...lash-pdfs.html

Except the Mortar Project is dead; see:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mortar_Project
(Click on the History tab to see no updates from Oct 2016 to Apr 2018,
and there is nothing under the Discussion tab.)

"in Gecko" refers to the rendering engine in Firefox. I did find:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Mee...r_.28PDFium.29

which indicates Mozilla doesn't consider PPAPI as a long-lived solution.
The commenter gives no evidence as to why PPAPI "isn't future-proof".
Hell, what is? Mozilla has changed rendering engines, plug-in support,
extension support (from XUL/COM to WebExtensions), and so on. So
they're going to whine that someone else's API won't last forever, too?
It does appear Mozilla did get PDFium (Google's Pepper Flash) into
Firefox (don't know as of which release) but decide to stop wasting time
trying to migrate to Pepper Flash.

https://techdows.com/2016/09/firefox...r-project.html

So, apparently Mozilla will go forward with their own interal plug-ins
for Flash. I can see why Mozilla wants to eventually kill off Flash
instead of keeping it alive by using Pepper Flash (but which is more
secure than the NPAPI model). Flash is dying (or is dead depending on
with whom you speak).

HTML5 video has supplanted Flash. Sites should have transformed their
Flash content to HTML5 video. Alas, many sites are slow or don't have
the resources to do the transforms, so a lot of sites still have lots of
Flash content. Some continue to carry Flash content for archival
reasons. Sites have had many years to convert from Flash to other
streaming media format but will not until they detect the death of their
site from lack of visitation due to users leaving that refuse to allow
Flash to run in their web clients.

In both Google Chrome and Firefox, I have Flash disabled. I don't even
see the old embedded Flash plug-in in Firefox 68. I went to
https://www.whatismybrowser.com/dete...lash-installed which reports
is not enabled or not installed, yet I see no option in Firefox to
enable/disable Flash support. Guess Mozilla removed their embedded
Flash plug-in awhile ago. C:\Windows\System32\Macromed\Flash doesn't
exist under which was the .dll file for the Flash player. I uninstalled
the external Flash plug-in from Adobe a long time ago and apparently
Mozilla got rid their embedded plug-in.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/...lugins/Roadmap
https://blog.mozilla.org/futurerelea...lash-end-life/

Mozilla intends to dump all Flash support as of sometime in 2020 (less
than 2 years from now). Even Adobe will discontinue updating their
Flash plug-in.

Google still has its Pepper Flash (aka Flash PPAPI) but I have that
option disabled. However, Google is going to kill off Flash support,
too, and perhaps why Mozilla decided to kill their Mortar Project after
getting in the PDFium library - and probably what the Mozilla wiki
author meant when he said Pepper Flash (PPAPI) "isn't future proof".

https://www.chromium.org/flash-roadm...coming-Changes

Even if you don't like the "Flash is dead" proclamation, Flash is a fish
on land that isn't even flopping around but gulping at water (to push
water over its gills) that isn't there. Flash *is* dead. We just have
to wait for the corpse to rot away.
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