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 <chrisccoul...@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 10 months after release Flash is no longer maintained 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 > > -- > ubuntu-desktop mailing list > ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com > https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
