From the press release it seems NPAPI is OS dependent while Pepper is less so.
This all assume there is actually going to be something more than security updates after 11.2 for other platforms. And that it is going to be something we would want on Linux.
>From the press release it seems NPAPI is OS dependent while Pepper is less so.
Correct. The NPAPI version of Flash is very platform-dependent; whereas Pepper Flash is almost completely platform neutral, and Chrome OS needs most of the same Pepper platform bits anyway. So, our maintenance overhead for Pepper Flash on Linux is very small. On top of that, Linux is broadly deployed throughout Google (and is very popular among Chrome developers), so we're scratching our own itch a bit.
Flash provides a lot of hardware abstractions, from H.264 accelerated video, to webcam and microphone access, and accelerated 3d (openGL) rendering. Does the Pepper API provide wrappers for all this stuff? Otherwise it would seem that Flash for Linux would still need to carry a lot of platform-dependent plumbing.
>This all assume there is actually going to be something more than security updates after 11.2 for other platforms. And that it is going to be something we would want on Linux.
There will be updates and they will be desirable in Linux assuming people continue creating Flash content that makes use of the new features: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3621096.
This all assume there is actually going to be something more than security updates after 11.2 for other platforms. And that it is going to be something we would want on Linux.