Flash, Shockwave & Unity3D

One nightmare problem across operating systems and device platforms (including Gnu/Linux) is; world wide web pages being created with incompatible browser plug-ins to the device trying to view it. That is the majority of plug-ins only being made to work on Microsoft's Windows and Apple's Macintosh (? whatever an Apple is called nowadays). Reading that statement some people may say "Who cares. Nobody uses (Gnu/)Linux.", however they would be forgetting the amount of other devices that can browse the web nowadays, including (but not limited to); Android, BSD, PlayStation consoles, Xbox consoles, iDevices, and Chromebooks.

Common Browser Plug-ins

Three of the, probably, most used plug-ins are:

• Adobe Flash Player - used by many sites to display video and other sites to watch flash animations and play flash games.
• Shockwave Player - not really used since the 90s (:P) and mainly used to play shockwave games.
• Unity3D - a somewhat new player to the table for 3D games, and despite Unity3D SDK being able to compile games to Linux, there is no native Linux web browser plug-in.

Two other commonly used browser plug-ins would be:

• Java - which is more of a VM and has it's own native versions.
• Silverlight - another new player, and I've never seen anything that uses it, nor do I care much for it. (Although is apparently used for Netflix?)

Linux Problems

Since not everybody is a gamer, they may have no need for Shockwave and Unity3D. In addition, some flash alternatives have come out, these being: HTML5 video players in sites like YouTube allowing for playback in the webm format, and Google Chrome using its own compiled version of flash which is compatible on Linux.
Flash Player has hit version 16.0 on Windows however, it is forever stuck on 11.2 in Linux. Whilst there is the Google Chrome version, it is only compatible with Google Chrome, and not with any other program that needs to use flash.
When sites started upgrading to use newer features of flash, it created problems in playing back video on some. Some of these problems were: Australian catch-up sites ABCiView and SBSonDemand would result in black screens and an error message saying something along the lines of that the video cannot be played at this time (ABCiView requires at minimum flash 11.7), SecondLife clients (such as Firestorm) have the problem of trying to play flash videos and flash games in their embedded browser (and embedded browser on objects)(one example being; it results in youtube videos either showing a black screen or a black screen with spinning icon).
The Linux Solution below fixes all of this.

The Ultimate Fix

HTML5

Would be either for the plug-ins to be open-sourced so the community can port them (not going to happen), OR for people to start using HTML5/CSS3/Javascript - which is already starting to happen.
Sites like Youtube and Vimeo supply HTML5 versions of their video players. Full 3D games and examples using WebGL can be found around the web such as three.js. 2D canvas games are also around as well as 2D CSS3 animations such as CSS3-man.
But none of these solve the problem right now.

Linux Solution

Pipelight

The answer... Pipelight: Windows plugins in Linux browsers.
Pipelight is a fork of Wine and allows for installing the Windows version of the web browser plug-in in Gnu/Linux.
Installation of Pipelight is easy:
http://pipelight.net/cms/installation.html

I use it mainly for flash and I find it to be very stable.
It allows playing iView in Firefox, and it allows playing youtube in SecondLife Firestorm. Sometimes on youtube in Firefox the flash plug-in will crash, but reloading the page never bothers me, it has however never crashed for me whilst watching a youtube video, only when opening far too many youtube tabs.

As of version 0.2.8

Supported standard plugins:

• silverlight5.1 - microsoft's silverlight
• silverlight5.0 - no idea why there needs to be 2 versions
• silverlight4 - or 3 versions for that matter
• flash - adobe flash player
• unity3d - unity3D, 3D gaming
• widevine - google's widevine media optimiser

Additional plugins (experimental):

• shockwave - shockwave player
• foxitpdf - foxit pdf reader, linux has its own pdf readers as well as built in browser readers
• grandstream - ip voice and video
• adobereader - adobe pdf reader, I guess for those who really can't get enough of adobe
• hikvision - video surveillance
• npactivex - ActiveX plugins
• roblox - MMO game
• vizzedrgr - retro gaming room plugin
• viewright-caiway - streaming
• x64-unity3d - 64bit version of Unity3D
• x64-flash - 64bit version of adobe flash player

There we have it. Adobe Flash on Linux and Adobe Flash in SecondLife/Firestorm on Linux.