The last month has seen an interesting confluence of events:
- Adobe has stopped supporting the default firefox flash plugin
- The latest adobe flash plugin is driving nvidia users crazy by turning people visible in flash videos 'blue', the only fixes available involve either increasing cpu usage by disabling hardware acceleration or other mods which might cause the flash plugin to crash more frequently.
- Open source implementations of flash have announced interesting milestones. Lightspark in particular was prominently featured on LWN, and supports calling of gnash for those flash formats it can't handle.
So, I decided to give Lightspark with Gnash fallback a try, and had the following experience:
- Compiling wasn't that difficult, although it did take awhile to review the various gentoo use flags enable. Note that for gnash fallback, the nsplugin for gnash shouldn't be installed. You only need the lightspark plugin.
- While most pages seemed to render fine, including youtube and WSJ, there were a few issues:
- Long wait times rendering some pages during which firefox became completely unresponsive.
- Many ads were replaced with a simple message that lightspark couldn't load them.
- Some pages caused error popups to appear.
- Some lightspark/gnash processes hung, and weren't terminated even when firefox realized that flash had crashed.
So, we're not ready to escape from Adobe yet....however, the fact that most flash sites were still usable is good progress.
