Raspberry Pi Trading has announced the latest release of Raspberry Pi OS[1], the default Debian-based operating system that ships on SD cards for Raspberry Pi devices. Raspberry Pi OS has now been updated with Chromium version 84, the open-source foundation of Google Chrome.
The Raspberry Pi OS team says it's done a lot of testing and tweaking in Chromium 84 to ensure Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom videoconferencing apps work well on it.
The move is part of efforts by the team behind Raspberry Pi to help users participate in the online video meetings that are now essential for work and family, almost a year after China acknowledged the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan.
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"They should all now work smoothly on your Raspberry Pi's Chromium," says Simon Long, a user experience engineer for Raspberry Pi.
The other big change is that Raspberry Pi's version of Chromium is dropping support for Adobe's Flash Player software. This will be the last version of Chromium on Raspberry Pi that supports Flash.
Adobe, along with Apple, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla, jointly announced in 2017 that they would end support for Flash at the end of 2020[3]. Flash historically has been a favorite target for cybercriminals but its capabilities have largely been replaced by open web standards like HTML5, WebGL and WebAssembly.
Adobe will no longer issue free security updates after December 2020, but enterprise customers can still buy patches via Samsung-owned Harman[4].
"Flash Player is being retired by Adobe at the end of the year, so this release will be the last that includes it. Most websites have now stopped requiring Flash Player, so this hopefully isn't