Substitutes for Adobe products?

[Cameronian]

Perhaps I'm neurotic but since coming across Foxit and reading about its pros and cons here I was struck by the whole bulk, nosiness, Active-X and LSO issues which seem to attach to all of the Adobe products. Obviously these are not always in the forefront of my mind but every now and then they get my goat while Foxit has been a totally pain-free experience.

Once again I've received a warning from my up-to-date FF that my Adobe add-ons/plug-ins are dangerously out of date so once again I try to update Flash, Flashplayer, Shockwave Flash etc. I follow the instructions to update them but it doesn't happen. I'm asked to turn off my virus protection (and I wonder how they could possibly have an honest reason for that requirement!) but even when I do so I still can't update - it just stops with no explanation. I strongly suspect it may be due to my BetterPrivacy and my cookie policy and my banning of Active-X and all of the other perfectly sensible things I do. So I restart my anti-virus and forget about it for a while.

Can I reasonably ditch the lot and install substitutes? Gnash may be a case in point, in place of Flashplayer (I think!), but it has been trashed by some advisors - albeit not too recently. Is it even a valid substitute? I watch quite a lot of YouTube and similar and friends are always sending me clips which I wouldn't want to miss.

Do I really need Flash, Flashplayer, Realplayer, Shockwave Flash, Quicktime, Windows Media Player and its Plug-in Dynamic.... thingy? Isn't here just one (perhaps two) uncomplicated bit(s) that will do the job and won't cheat and spy? The priority, though, is to replace the Adobe stuff unless I learn that any of the others are out to get me as well - I did say that some might think me neurotic!

I don't really even know what each Flash wotsit is used for. On my old "coffee percolator" (that's how my Spanish friends referred to my previous 98 machine!) I used to have similar sorts of issues and tried to make sense of different players and codecs and all sorts of stuff as possible replacements but it got me nowhere and I had to reinstall the Adobe stuff.

It goes against the grain that I believe their whole philosophy is underhand and so I'd just rather not support them. I can't be alone in this so would anyone care to advise me, please?

[mixture]

Cameronian,

Rumour has is that Adobe have just about finally bowed to Apple's decision to push HTML5 as the way forward on their iPhone and iPad, because they've supposedly been cutting numbers on their Flash development teams.

So possibly we may be seeing the start of the demise of Flash, Shockwave and Air whilst Adobe refocus on their core specialisms and perhaps look to new innovative technologies that don't have a reliance on proprietary browser plugins.

Unlike PDF, Flash, Shockwave and Air are proprietary Adobe technologies, not open standards (PDF is an ISO standard). Therefore any third party attempts at making a flash player would be based on rather morally (and legally) questionable reverse-engineering development methodologies.

[le Pingouin]

Therefore any third party attempts at making a flash player would be based on rather morally (and legally) questionable reverse-engineering development methodologies.

Nice FUD.

:)

[Cameronian]

mixture, I had heard a little of what you foretell but I don't see that waiting for it will solve the issue of my vulnerable plug-ins, which I really should fix as soon as possible, nor does it deliver me from the hands of the Phili... no, sorry, Adobe. I really don't like having any of their stuff on my machine. I mentioned Gnash which is supposed to be much improved. The lone voice which I have heard condemn it is from two or three years ago. Have you any view on Gnash now? How valid a substitute is it for the Adobe products and are there others which you might put forward instead? Thank you.

[Cameronian]

Hi SoCal App You will remember that I was unable to install the updates even after very briefly (and very much against my better judgement) suspending my AV protection. I suspect it was because I have quite a lot of other stuff which Adobe won't like because it may limit the opportunity to make a buck. Some of it is deliberately aimed at frustrating Adobe and to turn it off is like bending over and saying "Ok big boy, **** me" and I don't want to do that. I'd prefer to take my chances with the out-of-date plug-ins, I think.

Thanks for the link to Gnash but have you any opinion or even experience of it - first or second hand? They claim that it's now much more competent, totally honest and upfront - but they would say that, wouldn't they?

[le Pingouin]

Cameronian

With respect to Gnash, it works reasonably well but not entirely successfully. The Windows binary available on the site is well out of date. You're basically stuck with using Adobe software.

[DG101]

...
You're basically stuck with using Adobe software.

Perhaps not so. VLC by Videolan works for me - with no Adobe products installed on this computer.

[Cameronian]

Thank you le Pingouin and DG101. I started investigating Gnash and the more I read the more it seemed likely to be unsatisfactory and outside my comfort zone due to my own limited understanding of just so many things! I'm afraid that I came to more or less the same conclusion about VLC and Allplayer. I saw that the absolutely latest version of Flash Player claims to have made an effort to allay my security concerns.

Last night I tried to get round the installation issues I had with Flash Player, and got it to download in FF on my admin a/c. When I had finished it told me "you are now running Flashplayer" so I went to the BBC News site to test it (still on the admin a/c" and it didn't work - I was told that I still didn't have Flash Player, which seemed odd given that Adobe had told me that I was running it only two minutes earlier!

I wondered if I still had some older bits still lurking around so ran Revouninstall which found it straight away and uninstalled it afresh, ensuring that any related bits got the heave too. Back to the BBC News (still on admin) and tried to see a video clip to be told, as expected this time, that I didn't have Flash Player. I followed the BBC's link to install it and it went like clockwork and worked perfectly. So far so good....

I sign out of admin and back to my day-to-day account, open up Firefox and the BBC News but apparently I no longer have Flash Player even though it dutifully appears on this account's program list.

Now you can probably understand why some of the above alternatives to Flash Player are out of my comfort zone! Having installed a functioning version in the admin account which also appears as perfectly installed on the day-to-day account, how do I get the day-to-day a/c's Firefox to recognise it and use it, please?

P.S. Ha! Bl***y computers! In my day-to-day account FF tells me that it has still disabled my Flash Player plugin because it's out of date. Well, it isn't actually. It's just that I installed it via the admin account - "Pay Attention please, FF!"

[Cameronian]

Right, I've found how to undo the disabling which FF carried out off its own initiative and it all appears to work again. "Everything which doesn't kill you makes you stronger." is what springs to mind right now.

"Thank you very much" to those who have helped me. Now I'll go and watch the news......

[Biggles78]

What version of FireFox do you have installed? Version 7 has had issues with some apps but don't know if Flash is one, though it wouldn't surprise me.

You could try removing Flash completely and then reinstalling the lastest version clean. Removal tool available from Uninstall Flash Player | Windows (http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/141/tn_14157.html)

[Cameronian]

Hi Biggles78. I'm using Firefox 8.0. You'll see, two or three posts ago that I got it installed on my admin. account once I'd run Revo Uninstaller to cut out the older version. Revo uses, where available, the program's own uninstaller then gets stuck in with its own stuff to root out any odd scraps of program and related stuff which remains. I've used it a few times and it has worked well - just as efficient, in its own way, as Crap Cleaner and others.

What surprised me was the slightly odd process I had to go through to get FF to recognise that I had indeed already replaced the out of date version, which it had disabled on its own sayso, and so lift its ban. I'd have thought that it should have been programmed to recognise the appearance of the new up to date version automatically - even if, perhaps, only one encouraged by closing and restarting FF or rebooting the whole computer - both of which I tried a couple of times - but no. I had to delve into some deeper register of plug-ins and delete all of it (and therefore its registry of all of the other plug-ins as well). Restarting FF then prompted it to scan what was there and create a new registry (my layman's talk) and then all was well. It seems to me that FF could have done that before I had to interfere with its plug-in registry. It seemed just a little unnecessarily clumsy - maybe they'll read this and fix it, after all I can't be the only one who has been frustrated by the failing and everybody significant reads PPRuNe, don't they?.

[Feline]

While the discussion thus far seems to have been focused on Adobe Flash - I can thoroughly recommend Cute PDF Professional as a replacement for Adobe Reader. It has a neat "typewriter" feature which allows you to annotate existing PDF documents which I find very useful. It's not free, but well worth the modest amount to get out from under the dreaded Adobe with its outrageously huge update sizes.
Works for me - your mileage might vary.

[Saab Dastard]

If Cute PDF Professional is as good as the (free) Cute PDF writer, then it's well worth having. The writer is a little gem.

SD

[Feline]

Well SD, I simply don't use Acrobat any more (with the inference that I don't update it any more). Apart from the "typewriter" annotation function already mentioned, it also makes it very easy to add or delete pages to an existing PDF document, and also to merge separate PDF documents.
As I say - works for me!