Flash 9 for Solaris Sparc and x86 is in the house! : From the Mind of Wayne Abbott...

Wednesday Jul 11, 2007

Flash 9 for Solaris Sparc and x86 is in the house!

Finally! After a long gestation period the Flashplayer 9 plugin for Sparc and x86 is now out for public consumption. Leon Sha and other at Sun have done a great job working with Adobe to make this important technology available for Solaris. The Flash 7 plugin while usable had many issues particularly with intensive SWF files and had poor A/V sync on video. Of course even beyond the missing out on the features you only get with the later releases many sites over the last year have been requiring Flash 8 or 9 so even worse Solaris users were locked out. As a result many of us have had this at the top of our wish list (of course Adobe Reader for x86 is running a distant second).

I've been playing with the betas now since January and they have steadily improved to the point where now content at YouTube or classic animations like Maatkara, Genryu's Blade, and Xiao Xiao work extremely well now. The plugin will be bundled with Build 69 of Solaris Express but of course you don't have to wait. Happy browsing...

Posted at 12:40PM Jul 11, 2007 by curtaintime in Solaris | Comments[4]

Comments:

Reader being a distant second? given that most of sun's docs are in pdf, and that reader is version 4.x and barely works... one would think that it would be a close second or even first.

That said, i installed the new flash plaer. on firefox 1.5 (the solaris default), all i get are grey boxes. the beta worked better... hmmm....

Posted by john on July 11, 2007 at 01:48 PM EDT #

The only reason why a say second for Reader is that there are alternative means to read PDFs (the old 4.x version, xpdf, evince, etc.). I know not all of them work as well as the "real thing" particularly with forms, etc. but for the most part you're not dead in the water. I think most people are browsing far more than they are reading PDFs (not necessarily for business reasons of course) and the lack of a current Flashplayer has more of an impact on Solaris adoption - maybe not for the right reasons but as they say it is what it is...

Posted by Wayne Abbott on July 11, 2007 at 02:07 PM EDT #

Not having a dependable & fast PDF reader for Solaris x86 was one of the reasons I switched to using a Mac laptop. I had tried evince and gpdf, but they weren't as nice as acrobat and acrobat couldn't open some of the newer documents.

Posted by William Hathaway on July 11, 2007 at 03:30 PM EDT #

I don't blame you - the older versions of gpdf, etc. that shipped with S10 and earlier Solaris Express releases are not up to snuff. I hear the more recent version of evince in Solaris Express (which now includes Gnome 2.18) work pretty well and address some of the problems you mention. I'll know better firsthand when I update to build 68 later this week.

Posted by Wayne Abbott on July 11, 2007 at 03:40 PM EDT #