Beta Flash 25 Plugin Install

Horizon_Brave · 2016-10-27 00:38:17

Beta NPAPI Shared Object Plugin.

Filename: libflashplayer.so

Reasoning:
Linux users have had access to both NPAPI and PPAPI versions of Flash Player. However, for the last four years,
the NPAPI version has been held at 11.2 and regularly updated with only security fixes while the PPAPI
version (used in Chrome and Chromium based browsers), is in line with the standard Windows and Mac releases.

*NOTE* It should be known that making use of the NPAPI 24-Beta Flash Plugin is accepting the fact that it is indeed a beta build, and is not in the debian stable repos. This also implies that the beta NPAPI will be in a state of flux and is going to be updated with possible updates that could break your bunsen or browsering.

First some acronym clearing:
NPAPI - Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface
PPAPI - Pepper Plugin Application Programming Interface
(Fun Fact: Pepper isn't just about PPAPI, it actually is a good funded project that encompasses other projects as well)

So the new updates to NPAPI are available from Adobe-Labs, and can be found here:
Adobe-Labs Flash NPAPI / PPAPI

As adobe now back pedals to :
“improve security and provide additional mitigation to the Linux community.”
So, NPAPI developed Flash is now set to be back on track, with PPAPI Flash, this brings in support for Firefox/Chromium/Palemoon
Not sure about Opera, but I believe it uses the netscape api.

Also To Consider:

The NPAPI will now support 32bit and 64bit OS, which is another bit of good news....no pun intended. With the 24-Beta Adobe-Labs is providing 32 and 64 bit binaries in tar.gz format for NPAPI and PPAPI Linux. They'll will be adding RPM installers and
Standalone players in upcoming Beta releases.

Without using this option the ability to use Flash in a browser was a topic of much contension and headache. Seriously battlelines
were drawn. Adobe shrugged off updating linux for it's Flash player. Google then shrugged off 32 bit updates to it's PPAPI Flash
for linux, this is in reaction to their ultimate decision to give up the effort on updating 32 bit versions of Chrome. (See John Raff's post for still getting 32 bit Chrome: https://forums.bunsenlabs.org/viewtopic.php?id=2478

So for a while you'd have to have a 64 bit version of Chromium only to get the most up to date versions.

To add to the confusion, Firefox/Opera users would have to download the PAPPI Flash and the "shim" tool that's in the browser-plugin-freshplayer-pepperflash package.
So what that does is create a path and adapter which will make the browser "see" a PPAPI plugin rather than an NPAPI for compatibility.
Using this package also requires installing from backports which can be a bit of teeth gritting and frowned upon at times for stable.

So this is going to assume that you have no flash player installed. That means no Adobe Flash player from flashplayer-nonfree, or
if you have the bunsen-pepperflash package downloaded you'll have a Chromium PPAPI flash plugin, but no support for Firefox or Opera.
So what this will provide is a method to get NPAPI which will support Firefox/Chromium/Palemoon as well as be continued and updated with security updates and functionality.

Except GPU 3D acceleration and premium video DRM. (BBC viewers beware!) These features will not be ported over from the PPAPI Flash plugin. So if you do indeed this, you may be stuck using Chromium exclusively for that.

So..let's try this out:

First, some proof that I don't have flash installed:

Navigate to /usr/lib/firefox-esr/browser/
Unless you've had a reason to before with other other plugins,
you probably will not have the plugins/ directory here. Create it:

sudo mkdir plugins

cd plugins

Now punch the below wget command and it'll pull the latest libflashplayer.so This is the shared object plugin NPAPI.

wget  https://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/labs/flashruntimes/flashplayer/linux64/libflashplayer.so

Reboot firefox and it should pick it up from the plugins dir:

For Palemoon

First in order to get palemoon you'll have to add the openSuSe repo's to your sources.list.d/ directory. So do so at your own risk!
When I installed a clean palemoon, it didn't come with any flash support. In digging around it's configs, there is no plugins directory. It sources it's plugins from the /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/ directory. So to get this started first navigate to :

cd /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/

download the same NPAPI flash player as before:

wget  https://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/labs/flashruntimes/flashplayer/linux64/libflashplayer.so

You should be able to restart palemon and again like firefox it should pick it up.

Now for Chromium, which I downloaded myself (not using the bunsen-pepperflash script) It didn't come with any pre-packaged flash player. Just for curiosity sake, I added the NNAPI libflashplayer.so file to Chromium's plugin directory and Chromium doesn't recognize it. So it's my conclusion the Chrome/Chromium, atleast the current builds only make use of the PepperFlash and not the Netscape/Firefox NPAPI Flash.

So I went and installed the pepperflashplugin-nonfree (PPAPI) This of course worked:

But seeing all of this, it doesn't really seem to "Solve" anything. Chromium still only work with PPAPI and Firefox with either the nonfree browser-plugin-freshplayer-pepperflash wrapper, or now the aforementioned 24-Beta NPAPI, with limited graphical support. So to me the verdict is still out on which poison you'd prefer. At this point, it seems no matter what there is no one all covering option that will work with both that provides a minimal level of security.

I have yet to try this on Opera. I'll probably give that a go next and see how it works with the 24-Beta NPAPI.

For now, I'll be testing and monitoring the usage and function of Firefox using 24-Beta NPAPI. I don't have a *ton* of flash activity that I do, but I know of a few games/ and videos that I usually visit that I can test this against. I suppose time will probably be the biggest test for this. I hope Adobe-Labs though, does stick with this, and continue to provide support, at the very least for the security updates alone. The ultimate would be to have Google accept this and have Chromium be able to make use of it, giving us one unified plugin that truely cross platform...

Last edited by Horizon_Brave (2017-03-25 21:30:00)

johnraff · 2016-10-27 02:14:41

@H_B thanks for all your work on this.

Horizon_Brave wrote:

Chromium still only work with PPAPI and Firefox with either the nonfree browser-plugin-freshplayer-pepperflash wrapper, or now the aforementioned 23-Beta NPAPI, with limited graphical support. So to me the verdict is still out on which poison you'd prefer. At this point, it seems no matter what there is no one all covering option that will work with both that provides a minimal level of security.

Adobe may now be providing extended support for NPAPI (beta atm), but PPAPI is still the newer development. I don't think you can say that using NPAPI with Firefox is more secure than using PPAPI+browser-plugin-freshplayer-pepperflash. (The latter, btw, is not a "non-free" package at all. What is non-free is the Adobe software, whether NPAPI or PPAPI, so that's something that anyone using Flash has to live with.) Neither do I see using the Debian backports as "a bit of teeth gritting and frowned upon at times for stable". They're easy to enable, pinned at 100 by default, and, as long as you don't install from there indiscriminately, should be stable enough.

Chromium has always used PPAPI and there's no reason why it should start using NPAPI in the future. Chromium(or Google-chrome)+PPAPI has the security advantage of putting Flash in a "sandbox". NPAPI does not allow this, so Firefox is out of luck there, even going via the freshplayer wrapper.

So for security, I think PPAPI is close enough to an "all-covering option". But, there might be a performance advantage in using a recent NPAPI plugin with Firefox, instead of using PPAPI via freshplayer. I have an old, slow, laptop that I'd like to try the beta NPAPI plugin on.

stevep · 2016-10-27 18:13:59

Horizon_Brave wrote:

For Palemoon
First in order to get palemoon you'll have to add the openSuSe repo's to your sources.list.d/ directory. So do so at your own risk!

You must be talking about the various Debian and Ubuntu PM builds I maintain on the openSuse Build Service. Despite the SUSE in the name, they are built on native Debian and Ubuntu virtual machine platforms in the OBS, and haven't caused any reports of problems so far. (off-topic: the OBS is advertising a Debian Stretch platform, but I haven't found it yet. Now that I know how to get PM to build on that platform (it doesn't like gcc-5 yet), I'll have to ask on their forums where the heck it is!)

Horizon_Brave · 2016-10-28 17:51:16

stevep wrote:

Horizon_Brave wrote:
For Palemoon
First in order to get palemoon you'll have to add the openSuSe repo's to your sources.list.d/ directory. So do so at your own risk!
You must be talking about the various Debian and Ubuntu PM builds I maintain on the openSuse Build Service. Despite the SUSE in the name, they are built on native Debian and Ubuntu virtual machine platforms in the OBS, and haven't caused any reports of problems so far. (off-topic: the OBS is advertising a Debian Stretch platform, but I haven't found it yet. Now that I know how to get PM to build on that platform (it doesn't like gcc-5 yet), I'll have to ask on their forums where the heck it is!)

Oh you're *THAT* Steve P! I had no idea we had a celeb amongst us! I'm tempted to go back now and make sure I delete any negative things I've said about Palemoon

Anywho, going to clean up my original post. Have I stated anything there that is factually inaccurate. I'd hate to keep this up and open and spread mis-information

stevep · 2016-10-28 18:09:34

No fear, I'm not emotionally invested in Pale Moon. It was just one of the many packages we figured out how to rebuild for Debian-based MX Linux, but the lack of any Ubuntu or straight Debian packages got me into using the OBS to build those since there was a demand for them. The OBS is a nice tool for enforcing good build-dependencies in your package, though it also has a few quirks that make it differ from a regular local rebuild. Pale Moon also seems to error out on a build for mysterious reasons on both local and the OBS maybe 10% of the time, which is solved by restarting the build.

Horizon_Brave · 2017-03-23 04:27:25

FYI:

UPDATE TO 25.0.0.127

New release of the beta Adobe Labs Flash player. As stated Adobe is picking up support for the previous abandoned Chrome 32bit and F.F

http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer.html

This provides a NP-API for Safari, Firefox and...netscape..(is there still even a netscape browser??)

As well as the PP-API (pepper-plugin) for Chrome and Opera browsers. Both API versions are still supporting both 64 and 32bit browsers (including security updates)

Security patch updates for Flash 25:

https://helpx.adobe.com/security/produc … 17-07.html

Of course this is a beta version of flash, so all warnings of stability are implied hereto.

Last edited by Horizon_Brave (2017-03-23 04:35:06)

#1 2016-10-27 00:38:17

Beta Flash 25 Plugin Install

Beta NPAPI Shared Object Plugin.

#2 2016-10-27 02:14:41

Re: Beta Flash 25 Plugin Install

#3 2016-10-27 18:13:59

Re: Beta Flash 25 Plugin Install

#4 2016-10-28 17:51:16

Re: Beta Flash 25 Plugin Install

#5 2016-10-28 18:09:34

Re: Beta Flash 25 Plugin Install

#6 2017-03-23 04:27:25

Re: Beta Flash 25 Plugin Install

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