There was a time when I hoped that Adobe would port more of their applications to the Linux desktop. Those hopes have been dashed. Adobe has announced their roadmap for Adobe Flash and AIR and Linux is barely on it.
Adobe Flash Player 11.2 which is targeted for release in the first quarter of 2012 will be the last native version for Linux. This release include the following features:
- Mouse-lock support
- Right and middle mouse-click support
- Context menu disabling
- Support for more hardware accelerated video cards (from January 2008) in order to expand availability of hardware-accelerated content.
- New Throttle event API (dispatches event when Flash Player throttles, pauses, or resumes content)
- Multi-threaded video decoding pipeline on the desktop which improves overall performance of video on all desktop platforms
After that version comes out sometime soon that will be the end of the road for direct Linux Flash Player support. Thereafter, the Flash Player browser plug-in for Linux will only be available via a “Pepper” implementation of Flash Player for all x86/64 platforms supported by the Google Chrome browser. Google will begin distributing this new Pepper-based Flash Player as part of Chrome on all platforms, including Linux, later this year.