12

Update: Looks like pepper flash is adobe and should be made a synonym when it shows up.

This was addressed once, but this time it's different. See Tags flash, adobe-flash and flash-player.

I was trying to find some information on pepper flash player and had a difficult time finding what I was looking for.

Right now we have and referring only to Adobe Flash Player (similarly references as being only for Adobe Flash).

Since Pepper Flash Player has been... forced? onto some Chrome versions, it might be useful to have a flag for pepper-flash-player and one for adobe-flash-player or the flash-player tag should be updated.

Thoughts?

7
  • 6
    Just looking at the excerpts, [adobe-flash] is about the creator, [flash-player] is about the player (and [flash] is about the genre/files). Really poor choices of tag names--non-intuitive, confusing, asking to be misused, including flash drives, compact flash format, flashing firmware, non-Adobe products, etc. Usage is a mess. Needs cleanup.
    – fixer1234
    Commented May 12, 2016 at 8:15
  • 2
    Pepper Flash is still made by Adobe, though. The Debian description is wrong. It just uses a different API to integrate with Chrome. So the way I see it, just combining [flash-player] with [google-chrome] is the way to go.
    – Daniel B
    Commented May 16, 2016 at 9:45
  • @daniel is there a document with the correct description?
    – Raystafarian
    Commented May 16, 2016 at 9:53
  • No, just anecdotal evidence: In about:plugins and when right-clicking on a Flash applet, it’s still called “Adobe Flash Player”.
    – Daniel B
    Commented May 16, 2016 at 10:53
  • @DanielB helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/flash-player-google-chrome.html might indicate that as well; obviously the pepper flash thing is confusing enough that at least we need a synonym
    – Raystafarian
    Commented May 16, 2016 at 12:06
  • 1
    Here is the help center regarding Pepper Plugin API vs Native Plugin API used on Chrome: support.google.com/chrome/answer/6213033: "Plugins that use a newer, more secure system called Pepper API (PPAPI) still work. That includes plugins that come with Chrome, like Adobe Flash. There's no need to install anything extra because PPAPI plugins will update when Chrome does."
    – Andrew T.
    Commented May 18, 2016 at 9:05
  • Suggested edited title: peper-flash is peppered with ambiguity
    – Insane
    Commented May 23, 2016 at 2:05

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
1

That Debian description is mostly wrong, and there's little reason to think of "Pepper Flash" as being its own thing. It's simply a build of Adobe Flash Player that embeds into browsers using PPAPI (Pepper) rather than NPAPI (Netscape plugin API), because NPAPI support has been discontinued for years by both Google and Adobe. On Windows you will get one of three different versions of Flash depending on browser (PPAPI for Chrome, NPAPI for Firefox, ActiveX for IE), but that's a detail that hardly anyone has to worry about; you don't see a lot of questions about "ActiveX Flash" in particular.

The PPAPI version of Flash is bundled with Chrome and so normally doesn't need to be distributed separately, but Debian includes Chromium, which doesn't bundle Flash, but still supports it, so they need a package to add that in. It's a separate package from the old (NPAPI) Flash plugin because that one is still getting security updates, but it's a completely different version — Flash 11 for NPAPI, and Flash 22 (currently) for PPAPI. Since they update separately and have different versions, they're separate packages, thus "pepperflashplugin" vs "flashplugin". I would have gone for "flashplugin-ppapi" myself, but what can you do?

I believe the reason Debian says Pepper Flash is "maintained by Google" is because Google is the distribution channel for the version of the plugin that they install. And Google probably does do a good chunk of testing on it. But it's definitively not a separate Google product.

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .