Web Browsers.

[Charlie Clark]

On 2003-04-02 at 20:37:13 [+0200], Johnson David wrote:
> Flash is pretty much broken all around on FreeBSD. The reason is that the 
> Macromedia flash plugin is only for Linux. Therefore you can't run a 
> native FreeBSD browser and get decent flash, you need to run a Linux port 
> of a browser using the Linux plugin.

so the Linux plug-in will run on BSD if Linux compatability is enabled? How 
dependent is this on XFree86 and any window manager on top of this: I guess 
the runtime is quite easy to encapsulate and the rest should be calls to 
XFree86 / KDE, aren't they?

> This is NOT the fault of FreeBSD, it is the fault of Macromedia, who 
> continues to promote proprietary software as a web standard. Shame on 
> them!

Hold your horses: Flash was developed at a time when there was no 
alternative for that kind of content (AWT / Swing was and still is IMHO a 
joke and also just as proprietary) and Flash has its uses just like PDF 
from Adobe does. While it would be nice for Macromedia to maintain a 
BSD-Flash player I can understand why they don't. On BeOS a third party, 
the General Coffee Company developed and released their own player so this 
should be possible on BSD.

Of course, Macromedia's recent attempt to relaunch a complete Flash -ased 
website backfired and that's the best thing that could happen to them: 
they've gone back to mixing Flash with HTML.

Charlie