Adobe will continue to maintain Flash Player for Linux after all

Adobe has announced that it will continue to maintain the npapi version of the Flash Player for Linux. The company says it has made this decision for security reasons. Initially, support for this version would end in 2017.

Four years ago, Adobe announced that the npapi version of Flash Player would only receive security updates, the company writes on its blog. However, now Adobe has announced that it will merge this version with the modern release branch, which is currently at version 23. However, because it is mainly a security measure, users have to miss certain functions, such as 3D acceleration via the GPU and DRM for ‘premium video’.

For users who still want to use these features, Adobe recommends using the ppapi version of Flash Player. Until now, it was also available to Linux users and was used in browsers based on Chromium. With that, for example, until now Chrome users were able to use Flash on Linux systems. Firefox announced in 2015 that it would no longer allow npapi plugins by the end of this year, but made an exception for Flash. Chrome has long since stopped supporting the Netscape plug-in API.