At which time a Pepper version of Flash Player will be available

Feb 23, 2012 14:14 GMT  ·  By

Adobe announced that it would be dropping support for Flash Player on Linux. Moving forward, your only chance of running a recent Flash Player on Linux is to use Google Chrome, which comes with a built-in version.

Of course, this may seem like an evil plot by Google to gain market share on Linux, but that's not really the case.

Rather, it's the case of Adobe not wanting to pour any more resources into Flash and focusing on the platforms that matter and those aren't Linux.

Adobe already dropped the mobile version of the Flash Player and Linux follows. It won't be too surprising if in a year or two the Mac OS version follows the same fate.

Yet, even as Adobe abandons development, there will still be an up-to-date version of Flash Player for Linux, the one in Chrome.

This is possible because Google has been working with Adobe on new versions of the Flash Player plugin built on the Pepper Plugin API, PPAPI or Pepper for short, which is still mostly experimental and only supported by Google Chrome.

The main advantage of PPAPI is portability, a PPAPI plugin will run on any platform without any modifications to the code. This way, Adobe can build one version of the Pepper Flash Player and have it run on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and even Chrome OS.

In fact, Chrome OS has been using the Pepper version of the Flash Player plugin for quite some time now. And soon, Adobe will switch to the Pepper version for all desktop platforms as Google plans to roll out support for PPAPI in Chrome on all platforms in the coming months, as Adobe announced itself.

For now, that won't mean much as there aren't any Pepper-based plugins around. But Google is very determined to make Pepper and its partner Native Client (NaCl) a big part of Chrome.