Flash flaw leads to Vista laptop's fall | Hacker News Reader

Flash flaw leads to Vista laptop's fall

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7 pointsjmorin0074 comments

A Sony Vaio laptop running Ubuntu remained unscathed at the end of the conference.

Just one reason that all my computers run (Gentoo) Linux.

Several times I have replied in response to a comment about a startup using Flash, indicating that it can be difficult to get running for someone using Linux. This submission is another example of why relying on a technology like Flash (as opposed to an open protocol like HTML and Javascript) may be a bad idea: you could be forcing your users to compromise their machine.

It's unfortunate that Flash is still a proprietary domain, given that it's become both increasingly prevalent and useful. I've put a substantial amount of work into developing a Flash game and have discovered, as I follow the market, that a lot of games are incompatible across different versions of the plugin. Fonts go missing, graphics features behave with different levels of performance, and worst of all, on some versions of the plugin, errors that elsewhere went ignored cause exceptions and terminate execution, resulting in the game becoming wholly unplayable.

I've also discovered a way to consistently crash the Linux plugin.

I'm hoping for either a suitable, market-accepted replacement to come along, or for an emulation like Gnash to get up to speed with the newest versions of SWF.

Hmm. Interestingly enough, I haven't had a single problem with Flash in Ubuntu. Not one.

Mind sharing said way? >:)

Are you using a 64-bit architecture? When I was running 64-bit Firefox and using nspluginwrapper to run Flash, I was getting total browser lockups and 50% (100% of one CPU) usage in some (totally random) instances of Flash usage. It got to the point where I downgraded to 32-bit Firefox with 32-bit Flash, where I haven't had as many problems (but still some laggy Firefox performance, for example on Buffalo Wild Wings' website). Actually, I would guess that because of issues like this and the Java plugin, Ubuntu probably uses 32-bit Firefox even for 64-bit architectures.

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