Adobe Releases 64bit Flash Plugin for Linux

[Martin Stransky]

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.