This announcement from Adobe here is pretty interesting. In a nutshell, Chrome guys built a new API (Pepper) which allows developers to execute stuff in the browser, using sandboxed native code. Now Google helps Adobe (I don’t know exactly how) and offers an easier integration of Flash in the browser. Then, Adobe choose to focus on integrating Flash in the browser using this API. For the Linux version of Flash plug-in, Adobe won’t support other APIs (hence, other browsers than Chrome).
Paul Rouget tweeted about a mail from Robert O’Callahan talking about the Pepper API. He says that there is already a “rich platform API to sandboxed code : the standards-based Web APIs”. This is mostly true : these APIs are in the making, people are working on it and there is less and less missing fundamental APIs (after all, they’re able to make Boot2Gecko… in Javascript).
Mozilla, and probably other vendors, don’t plan to work on Pepper, since they believe it’s a “duplication of effort”.
I believe that this is exactly why Adobe is doing this right now. They are gambling and trying to impose a dilemma to other browsers: vendors change their mind, allow native stuff in the browser and therefore let Flash live as an environment parallel to all the new web technologies (HTML5, Js new APIs, etc) or they impose the lack of Flash for Linux users, who won’t be able to play Cityville under Firefox anymore.
I believe Adobe couldn’t do this latter: the standard-based APIs are more and more used against Flash which is used as a last-resort solution. In a short time, authoring tools and stable API will convince developers to drop Flash and Adobe, unless Flash can compete with the standard APIs. That’s what brings Pepper: a better integration of native code into the browser.