Four years ago, Adobe made a decision to stop updating the Flash Player package (NPAPI) on Linux, aside from delivering security patches. It has made an about turn on this decision in the last week and has said that it will keep it in sync with the modern release branch going forward. It is currently testing the latest build in a beta capacity.
The move will see Mozilla Firefox users bumped up to the latest release of Flash Player if they have the package installed. For the last four years, only the Flash Player (PPAPI) in Google Chome has been kept up to date.
In its announcement, Adobe wrote:
“In the past, we communicated that NPAPI Linux releases would stop in 2017. This is no longer the case and once we have performed sufficient testing and received community feedback, we will release both NPAPI and PPAPi Linux builds with their major version numbers in sync and on a regular basis.”
Although this is great news for Linux users who don"t want to struggle to watch Flash content online, there also a few drawbacks. Adobe writes:
“Because this change is primarily a security initiative, some features (like GPU 3D acceleration and premium video DRM) will not be fully implemented. If you require this functionality we recommend that you use the PPAPI version of Flash Player.”
Testers can download the new NPAPI binaries today from the Adobe Labs download page. Unfortunately for users running a Fedora-based distribution, the beta build is not supported on those installs.