Adobe is dropping linux support after 11.2. With the except of Chrome due to a new API that "aims to provide a layer between the plugin and browser that abstracts away differences between browser and operating system implementations."
Given that linux really hasn't been a priority for them and they are dropping flash all together; this isn't really news.
The press release says Adobe worked with Google on Pepper. So for them to have a bias towards it isn't groundbreaking.
From the press release it seems NPAPI is OS dependent while Pepper is less so.
This all assume there is actually going to be something more than security updates after 11.2 for other platforms. And that it is going to be something we would want on Linux.
>From the press release it seems NPAPI is OS dependent while Pepper is less so.
Correct. The NPAPI version of Flash is very platform-dependent; whereas Pepper Flash is almost completely platform neutral, and Chrome OS needs most of the same Pepper platform bits anyway. So, our maintenance overhead for Pepper Flash on Linux is very small. On top of that, Linux is broadly deployed throughout Google (and is very popular among Chrome developers), so we're scratching our own itch a bit.
Flash provides a lot of hardware abstractions, from H.264 accelerated video, to webcam and microphone access, and accelerated 3d (openGL) rendering. Does the Pepper API provide wrappers for all this stuff? Otherwise it would seem that Flash for Linux would still need to carry a lot of platform-dependent plumbing.
>This all assume there is actually going to be something more than security updates after 11.2 for other platforms. And that it is going to be something we would want on Linux.
There will be updates and they will be desirable in Linux assuming people continue creating Flash content that makes use of the new features: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3621096.
Given that linux really hasn't been a priority for them and they are dropping flash all together; this isn't really news.
The press release says Adobe worked with Google on Pepper. So for them to have a bias towards it isn't groundbreaking.