Not too soon: Moonlight 2 finally reaches beta
tech-no-media.com
tech-no-media.com
This statement is erroneous to some extent. Flash 7 for Linux was of dubious quality, Flash 8.x for Linux was skipped altogether, and Flash 9 wasn't released simultaneously with the Windows/Mac versions.
Linux is a second-class citizen for Adobe ... of course, they have reasons to not consider Linux. But there's no guarantee from the history of the project that this level of support will be continued in later versions.
Also, Moonlight is not a Microsoft project. It's an open-source project sponsored by Novell and it is in a better shape than any Flash-clone available. This is very important to me ... it means that it's portable to any platform available (you don't depend on Adobe in any way), and it also means that you have an open community willing to help. Also, some of the features in Silverlight 3.0 are already in Moonlight (like the pluggable codecs).
I must warn the curious that Moonlight currently has some stability/performance issues.
Player 8 skipped Linux because it was an interim release with a better graphics engine, and was replaced shortly by Player 9 with a faster logic engine. Unfortunately this was during the same time that YouTube first became popular. Historical notes here: http://blogs.adobe.com/jd_archive/archives/2006/08/linux_obs...
"Linux is a second-class citizen for Adobe" Nah. There's not much chance of revenue for Creative Suite porting, but tools like Flex Builder, and runtimes like AIR, all bring Linux to parity... for instance: http://blogs.adobe.com/jd_archive/archives/2008/03/what_airl... http://blogs.adobe.com/jd/2009/05/linux_journal_readers_choi... http://blogs.adobe.com/jd_archive/archives/2007/10/flex_buil...
The explosive thing is next year's devices -- both mobile and home wallscreens -- which use Linux operating systems in higher proportion than do laptops. Check out openscreenproject.org for context on how important Linux has become at Adobe.
However, if you showed me a flash plugin that won't crash, would work with every browser (including my Konqueror) and wouldn't eat 99% CPU, I'll go WOW all over.
Because Flash is everything. Youtube. Conference videos. Anything else, you name it.