Adobe Releases 64bit Flash Plugin for Linux

[Gilboa Davara]

On Wed, 2008-11-19 at 09:28 +0100, Martin Stransky wrote:
> Brennan Ashton wrote:
> > 2008/11/18 Jesse Keating <jkeating at redhat.com>:
> >> On Tue, 2008-11-18 at 14:21 -0500, Neal Becker wrote:
> >>> Should nspluginwrapper be banned from wrapping this?  If so, should
> >>> this be included in flash-plugin.spec?
> >> Oh, I'm pretty sure you still want to keep flash separated from your
> >> browser, regardless of the arch.
> > 
> > Not according to the developer of the 64bit plugin.
> > 
> > "
> > Talking about nspluginwrapper: I strongly suggest not to use it. I
> > know that some distros are thinking of even wrapping 64-bit plugins
> > including Ubuntu with the thought that it will improve security and
> > stability of the browser. This is a very bad idea in the state
> > nspluginwrapper is in today. We have done some internal testing and
> > discovered that several features in the Flash Player are broken when
> > the plugin is wrapped. More importantly performance and user
> > experience is pretty bad when the plugin is wrapped. Why? Lots of data
> > needs to be transfered through IPC channels. I hope that browser
> > vendors will eventually come up with a better architecture to wrap
> > plugins without sacrificing performance, stability and functionality.
> > "
> > http://www.kaourantin.net/2008/11/64-bits.html
> > 
> > 
> > I am not advocating one way or another, just wanted to get the voice
> > out of one of the few who really knows what is going on behind the
> > plugin.
> 
> For instance, NPAPI plugins can share memory with browser and operate 
> with internal browser memory (like DOM tree) and this "feature" is 
> blocked by nspluginwrapper because of it's simple architecture.
> 
> Full browser-side emulation will be extremely complex and is close to 
> chrome model where one process holds one browser page...
> 
> ma.

... And the last thing you'll want (from both stability and privacy
viewpoint) is to have a random plugin running code from some random
website have access to your browser memory space.

As for using multiple processes instead of multi-threading, I fully
agree. (though I can't really comment about Chrome as I never tested it)

- Gilboa