The NY Times released an interesting article on Ubuntu trying to take on the mainstream desktop market. Great. You've already got me doing it.
I have a suggestion for one roadblock that has to be removed first.
This article in 2007 seems to indicate that most linux users use firefox as their default browser. It's 2009 and I'd be willing to bet that the 60% number is much higher by now, and also much higher for Ubuntu users. This is actually great for Linux, because firefox is pretty much feature-identical in Linux or Windows.
The problem is the stupid plugins, namely Flash. I run 64-bit Ubuntu at home and last I checked, Adobe still hadn't released a 64-bit Flash plugin for Linux. There is a workaround, but it requires a good bit of technical know-how and requires running firefox in 32-bit mode. Even still, my browser randomly freezes nearly every time I open more than one embedded flash thingy at a time requiring a full restart. Since I often leave pandora running in the background, this is much worse as I already have 1 flash app running. Running across any page that has flash is equivalent to asking firefox to playing russian roulette. And some days I feel that there are no missing bullets.
With so many sites now basically assumming I have flash running, the web feels like a minefield sometimes. Please Adobe/Firefox/Ubuntu fix this sad state!
1 comments:
There's a beta 64-bit flash plugin available now, but its 32-bit beta partner is crashtacular.
Check out nspluginwrapper -- Redhat apparently uses it on all their systems, to sandbox flash.
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