> There is nothing to fear from an OS player, just things to hope. agreed. adobe's market share for flashplayers is pretty much 100%. most developers still use macromedia/adobe tools for development which have the adobe player built in for testing. the adobe player is well ahead of any alternatives when it gets to features, and with the new VM there will be another feature which will be very difficult to match. finally, it's increasingly used for video, and the on2 codec is proprietary and therefore won't be used in gnash. that leads me to think that the gnash team will work hard to ensure the most possible level of compatibility, and the browser plugin -- which is what we care about when we worry about incompatibilities -- will only be used by users who either can't run the adobe player on their systems, or reject proprietary software for ideological reasons. both tend to be fairly technical people, and made a conscious decision to live with those limitations in their "user experience". if it comes pre-installed with firefox normal users will treat it like an outdated version and install the newest (adobe) plugin instead.
my guess is that gnash will mainly be used for standalone apps, either by itself or just for the GUI, and that it will ship with the SWF it is supposed to run (i.e. the SWF will be written specifically to run in gnash). i think that's great for developers -- more use of flash. even better if they grant the mozilla foundation's request to change the license to LGPL (which probably wouldn't go down well with adobe, though). mark On 1/31/06, Nicolas Cannasse <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I think you could make an argument that having multiple VM (or at > > least the incompatibilities between them) has hurt Java on the client > > side. > > > > I can't tell you how many times I have gone to run an applet, and it > > won't run because I don't have the correct jvm installed in my > > browser (Macromedia's expense report system was built as an applet, > > and this caused quite a few problems). > > > > mike chambers > > I don't think any OS player will substitute to the official one on the > platform supported by Adobe (mainly Windows and Mac). There is no direct > gain for the end-user so it doesn't make sense to switch the player. For > instance Firefox was a relative success only because IE security > problems and some global improved experience (tabs). > > On the platform not supported by Adobe (I'm partialy incuding Linux > because it seems like Player7 have some bugs - which is BTW hurting both > developers and users), it makes a lot of sense to have an OS player, > since even if it have some stuble differences - maybe enhancements - > it's always better than *nothing*. As a system developer, I understand > that you cannot put tremendous resources on supporting platforms used by > a small percentage of users such as FreeBSD on 64-bit. It's then logical > to help good willing people to fix that for you. > > It also makes a lot of sense on the Desktop (there are issues with Flash > Player licensing), on embedded devices (I would love to run my games on > Nintendo DS or Sony PSP) and everywhere else outside the browser, where > the player can be modified/customized for your own needs. > > The lack of OS alternative (or Adobe opening the player source) is IMHO > a major showstopper in the adoption of Flash as a platform. Most of the > users don't want vendor lock-in when it comes to running the code, and > that's good news for Adobe, since Flash business model is about selling > the IDE. > > There is nothing to fear from an OS player, just things to hope. > > Nicolas > > _______________________________________________ > osflash mailing list > [email protected] > http://osflash.org/mailman/listinfo/osflash_osflash.org > -- http://snafoo.org/ jabber: [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ osflash mailing list [email protected] http://osflash.org/mailman/listinfo/osflash_osflash.org
