9 ms·

Swiffy: convert SWF files to HTML5

254 points by Robin_Message 15y ago

_delirium 15y ago
It'd be interesting if this progressed enough so that browsers could offer built-in conversion of Flash content to run it without the Flash plugin enabled.
- loganlinn 15y ago
  Indeed. It's as if Flash is an addictive drug, and we are coming up with ways to ween ourselves off of it.
  - jbwyme 15y ago
    Flash was built to fill a gaping hole in the market. I think that hole is just about filled (or will be post HTML 5) for the majority of use cases. I see flash falling into smaller niche-based use cases in the near future.
    - dpcan 15y ago
      Before this can happen, there needs to be a brain-dead easy to use IDE for creating Flash-like presentations in HTML5. Right now, I see the biggest benefit of Flash being that I can purchase a number of IDE's and create some multimedia (or games) for the web in no time.
      - recusancy 15y ago
        There are already tools like Sencha http://www.sencha.com/products/animator/ http://www.sencha.com/products/animator/
      - splatcollision 15y ago
        There's Edit Room, my product, a dead-simple CSS3 animation creation tool. http://edit-room.com/ http://edit-room.com/
        noduerme 15y ago
        looks like it could use a little work in firefox 5 before it's at uh, flash level quality: (screenshot) http://www.opencombinator.com/editroom.png http://www.opencombinator.com/editroom.png
        splatcollision 15y ago
        Yes, firefox support will get there eventually... It just came out and I'm a solo developer - this is my side project. Thanks for checking it out!
      - antimatter15 15y ago
        I made this a few years ago, http://antimatter15.com/ajaxanimator/wave/ http://antimatter15.com/ajaxanimator/wave/ I started it when I was in sixth grade, some four years ago and it hasn't changed much in the past two years. Understandably, it's not nearly feature complete. It's actually pretty interesting that when I started out, the goal was to have Flash as the output, because embedding HTML just seemed so impractical.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
pornel 15y ago
> Which browsers support Swiffy output? > Swiffy uses SVG features that are currently only supported by Webkit-based browsers such as Safari (on desktop and mobile) and Chrome. That's not the HTML5 future I wanted :( In Opera it fails due to JS errors that don't look SVG-specific. It's a shame, because Opera's SVG support is a bit more complete than WebKit's: http://www.codedread.com/svg-support.php http://www.codedread.com/svg-support.php (sadly the Swiffy's site doesn't say exactly which feature it needs) Anyway, it's great that they're using SVG. Good use-case for SVG will help it get more love from browser vendors, and perhaps developers won't have to reinvent SVG with canvas :)
- jbwyme 15y ago
  I don't think this is indicative of the future of HTML5 and I'm not so sure there will be a reason to use these SWF->HTML5 converters other than maybe a head start on re-developing your application. Have you tried converting a PDF to word? Converters for proprietary technologies haven't proven to be very effective.
  - whatever_dude 15y ago
    The problem with both converting SWF and PDF into more 'open' formats is not that they're proprietary (SWF specs are freely available no anyone; not sure about PDF) but that they're final formats. PDFs, for example, retain information about how something should be rendered, not edited; hence why blocks of text get cut when trying to convert it to anything (there's no text flow information). In the same way, images are downscaled, transparencies are flattened or rasterized, fonts are broken down... there's too much lost. A SWF is the same; it'd be better to work from original files and projects (similar to what Wallaby is trying, and maybe Hype?) to 'compile' everything to HTML5 (or whatever output format) than trying to transcode something from a format that was optimized for one specific kind of player.
- jarek 15y ago
  At this point I'm beginning to doubt we'll ever actually get to a fully cross-browser web. We've had two broad reboot attempts (first to "XHTML+CSS", the current one to "HTML5") and both times we ended up largely with a limited list of browsers and engines supported just as we had in the days of Netscape 4.x/IE4. The supported browsers are the cool browsers/engines of the day, which we then proceed to curse in three-four years. Only the names of the browsers change. Edit: heh, didn't even notice who I was replying to.
afhof 15y ago
Seems to be limited to 512kB. Thats not much of a demo.
thailandstartup 15y ago
It's counterintuitive but Adobe should be working on a project like this. A decent server side SWF->HTML5 would enable existing websites to offer the first class experience (the SWF) to Flash enabled browsers, and push a HTML5 conversion for non-Flash browsers (Apple mobile devices). It would shaft Apple (Why does this run so slow on the iPad?) and slow the move away from Flash (Adobe could still make a credible 'runs everywhere' argument).
- jbwyme 15y ago
  http://mashable.com/2011/03/08/adobe-wallaby/ http://mashable.com/2011/03/08/adobe-wallaby/
  - thailandstartup 15y ago
    Wallaby is a feature of the IDE to publish as HTML5 - it doesn't seek to address all the SWF content that is already out there.
johnhenry 15y ago
I can't help but wonder if content owners might view this as a threat to the security of their flash creations. Afterall, this is essentially a decompiler, isn't it?
- georgemcbay 15y ago
  Plain Flash SWFs are trivial to decompile and decompilers have been available basically since the beginning of the platform. Anyone who really worries about that sort of thing is running their Flash output through obfuscators/minifiers similar to the ones available for JavaScript. With such obfuscated swfs you can still extract the code but it'll be basically an unmaintainable mess. I'm sure the output of such obfuscated code with this tool is just as bad as it would be if decompiling the bytecode to ActionScript, if not worse.
- whatever_dude 15y ago
  The SWF format is open (in the sense that it's a published spec) and many SWf decompilers already exist. This doesn't change anything in that regard.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
jvandenbroeck 15y ago
I don't know if that's a smart move from Google. It would be a good thing for Google to have users frustrated with Flash websites that don't work in iOS. Now they are helping Apple giving users a great experience on iOS?
watty 15y ago
I tried a handful of random SWF files from my dropbox and none of them worked. Several were due to AS 3.0, which isn't supported but even simplest animation said "The #initclip pragma is not supported.".
- whatever_dude 15y ago
  #initclip is an internal syntax used normally when using AS2 classes (it was auto-generated, although you could use it manually too), as it forced code to run before the normal execution cycle.
efnx 15y ago
The major downside is that most webshops are and have been using Actionscript 3 for the past 5 years. Has anyone compiled any AS3 with this?
- efnx 15y ago
  Here is the output after trying to convert one of my projects: 9-slice scaling is not supported. (11 occurrences) Pixel hinting on strokes is not supported. (10 occurrences) Filters are not supported. (100 occurrences) Shape tweens are not supported. (2 occurrences) ActionScript 3.0 is not supported. (2 occurrences) Advanced text rendering using continuous stroke modulation is not supported. (3 occurrences)
  - hammock 15y ago
    Some more errors here, just so we can start compiling a list of what is unsupported: An unsupported SWF tag was encountered. (1 occurrences) The global ActionScript property _quality is not supported. (1 occurrences) Character glyphs aligned on pixel boundaries are not supported. (4 occurrences) The #initclip pragma is not supported. (23 occurrences) An unsupported audio codec was encountered. (1 occurrences)
    - joshuarrrr 15y ago
      A couple more: Miter limit will behave differently, as it will revert to bevel instead of cutting off the joint. (65 occurrences) Adjusting the font kerning within dynamic text is not supported. (7 occurrences)
- whatever_dude 15y ago
  Testing some (very) old SWF of mine: Custom font kerning is not supported. (2 occurrences) Streaming audio is not supported. (17 occurrences) Blend modes are not supported. (6 occurrences) Scenes are not supported. (1 occurrences) Filters are not supported. (426 occurrences) Adjusting the letter spacing within dynamic text is not supported. (1 occurrences) Advanced text rendering using continuous stroke modulation is not supported. (5 occurrences) ActionScript 3.0 is not supported. (2 occurrences)
fedorabbit 15y ago
My experience of HTML5 right now doesn't really have significant performance improvement compare to Flash, even on Mac OS X. I think it still has a long way to go. But it is nice to see someone's exploring the frontier! The blurring effect doesn't seem right though...
- phoboslab 15y ago
  That really depends on what you want to do. The drawing performance for the canvas element has been dramatically improved in the last few months - for desktop browsers at least. And then of course, there's WebGL; even if you just use it for 2D stuff (shameless plug: http://www.phoboslab.org/xtype/ http://www.phoboslab.org/xtype/ ) it's way faster than Flash. I have no doubt that in a few month the the 2D canvas context will have the exact same performance (if not better) as WebGL for 2D stuff.
- cryptoz 15y ago
  My experience of HTML5 is that it blows Flash out of the water. Flash on Linux is (still) an absolute disaster while HTML5 is making progress every day and has long surpassed Flash in usefulness for most tasks.
  - tensor 15y ago
    I'm very skeptical. Claims like this never seem to be born out in actual benchmarks. http://pacoup.com/2011/02/03/flash-vs-html5-performance/ http://pacoup.com/2011/02/03/flash-vs-html5-performance/ http://www.craftymind.com/guimark3/ http://www.craftymind.com/guimark3/ The advantage of flash right now is that you can be reasonably sure that if a user has it installed, they will get a minimum set of features and performance. With HTML5, your complex app may run fine, or may not run at all, depending on the users implementation. I've no doubt the performance gap between flash and html5 will continue to narrow. However, I'm less sure that there is anything in the design of html5 that would allow for implementations that are significantly faster than flash allows for. Perhaps someone with deeper technical knowledge of the two could comment. HTML5 does have the advantage that it's an open platform, of course. Thus you are much more likely to actually see competing implementations of the standard.
pgbovine 15y ago
first paragraph of TFA: Last summer, an engineering intern named Pieter Senster joined the mobile advertising team to explore how we could display Flash animations on devices that don’t support Adobe Flash player. Pieter made such great progress that Google hired him full time and formed a team to work on the project. Swiffy was born! what an awesomely productive intern! now that's a way to secure yourself a full-time job!
- smackfu 15y ago
  That probably should say: "joined the mobile advertising team to explore how we could display Flash advertisements on devices that don’t support Adobe Flash player" Which is not really the cool HTML5 future anyone is looking for.
  - spjwebster 15y ago
    Anyone who is looking for the "cool HTML5 future" to be ad-free is going to be bitterly disappointed. Online ads predated the ubiquity of Flash, and they'll be around long after Flash is forgotten.
    - noduerme 15y ago
      yeahhh... basically we can turn the last 15 years of annoying flash ads back into the modern equivalent of animated gifs. whoopee =)
      - jarek 15y ago
        At least animated GIFs are easy to disable and doing so tends to have less undesired effects than disabling Flash.
        smackfu 15y ago
        At least animated GIFs are easy to disable and doing so tends to have less undesired effects than disabling Javascript. And since this is really replacing it with Javscript...
kachnuv_ocasek 15y ago
Great example of misuse of the HTML5 buzzword.
tolmasky 15y ago
How does this compare to Gordon? https://github.com/tobeytailor/gordon/wiki https://github.com/tobeytailor/gordon/wiki
- EvilRyry 15y ago
  Both are ways to play flash content without flash but the approaches are quite different. Gordon is a Flash runtime written in Javascript, allowing the browser to play SWFs. Swiffy is a tool separate from the browser that converts SWFs into a form usable by browsers (SVG and JS).
whatever_dude 15y ago
Reality check: like it says, it converts a subset of Flash 8 content. It means it converts a subset of content that was made for a version of Flash that is 6 years old (Flash 8 was released in 2005; Adobe is about to release Flash Player 11). Sorry, this is not the "Flash killer" you're looking for.
- chc 15y ago
  Maybe I haven't been paying enough attention, but Flash circa 2011 doesn't seem all that much better than Flash circa 2005. If it gets them on iPhones, I think most people would happily take Flash 8 and possibly not even notice the downgrade.
  - whatever_dude 15y ago
    Everything from Flash Player 9 onwards: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash_Player#Release_history http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash_Player#Release_hist... Too much stuff to mention, but the new VM especially. I personally haven't been working with AS2 (the old VM) in 3 years. If one wants to create new content (and thus can "afford" to go back some versions) then this could be useful. Simple banners and whatnot maybe. But in that case, using many of the new HTML5 native editors is probably a better bet.
noduerme 15y ago
Sweet! So all the obnoxious animation and banner ads can be converted into "HTML5" that runs 3x slower and sucks up 80% of a dual core processor per ad...and NONE of the actual coding, deep interactivity or UI enhancements implied in the ECMA4/AS3 platform are included. Is this the shape of things to come? Let me off this stupid ride, google. I vote DuckDuckGo, pageranks based on qualified user responses regardless of crawlable content, interactivity with client-side languages and structures that can't necessarily be crawled by a bot script, and an end to a monolithic, archaic system of ranking up corporate garbage. BLOW ME, Google. Apple. HTML5 lovers. If anyone needs proof Flex/Flash won't be dead for a long time, here it is =)
- lparry 15y ago
  You're obviously a windows user (and a flash "developer"), because for people on every other platform it's flash that chews up 80%CPU time and runs dog slow. Maybe if adobe hadnt give every other platform such shitty implementations, there mightn't be so many people working towards killing it.
libria 15y ago
Cool. Now if we only had a Silverlight -> HTML5+js converter we could quell the Windows 8 uproar.
johnx123 15y ago
Bloated code http://swiffy.googlelabs.com/gallery/example1_swiffy.html http://swiffy.googlelabs.com/gallery/example1_swiffy.html

254 points by Robin_Message 15y ago

It'd be interesting if this progressed enough so that browsers could offer built-in conversion of Flash content to run it without the Flash plugin enabled.

loganlinn 15y ago
Indeed. It's as if Flash is an addictive drug, and we are coming up with ways to ween ourselves off of it.
- jbwyme 15y ago
  Flash was built to fill a gaping hole in the market. I think that hole is just about filled (or will be post HTML 5) for the majority of use cases. I see flash falling into smaller niche-based use cases in the near future.
  - dpcan 15y ago
    Before this can happen, there needs to be a brain-dead easy to use IDE for creating Flash-like presentations in HTML5. Right now, I see the biggest benefit of Flash being that I can purchase a number of IDE's and create some multimedia (or games) for the web in no time.
    - recusancy 15y ago
      There are already tools like Sencha http://www.sencha.com/products/animator/ http://www.sencha.com/products/animator/
    - splatcollision 15y ago
      There's Edit Room, my product, a dead-simple CSS3 animation creation tool. http://edit-room.com/ http://edit-room.com/
      - noduerme 15y ago
        looks like it could use a little work in firefox 5 before it's at uh, flash level quality: (screenshot) http://www.opencombinator.com/editroom.png http://www.opencombinator.com/editroom.png
        splatcollision 15y ago
        Yes, firefox support will get there eventually... It just came out and I'm a solo developer - this is my side project. Thanks for checking it out!
    - antimatter15 15y ago
      I made this a few years ago, http://antimatter15.com/ajaxanimator/wave/ http://antimatter15.com/ajaxanimator/wave/ I started it when I was in sixth grade, some four years ago and it hasn't changed much in the past two years. Understandably, it's not nearly feature complete. It's actually pretty interesting that when I started out, the goal was to have Flash as the output, because embedding HTML just seemed so impractical.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

pornel 15y ago

> Which browsers support Swiffy output? > Swiffy uses SVG features that are currently only supported by Webkit-based browsers such as Safari (on desktop and mobile) and Chrome. That's not the HTML5 future I wanted :( In Opera it fails due to JS errors that don't look SVG-specific. It's a shame, because Opera's SVG support is a bit more complete than WebKit's: http://www.codedread.com/svg-support.php http://www.codedread.com/svg-support.php (sadly the Swiffy's site doesn't say exactly which feature it needs) Anyway, it's great that they're using SVG. Good use-case for SVG will help it get more love from browser vendors, and perhaps developers won't have to reinvent SVG with canvas :)

jbwyme 15y ago
I don't think this is indicative of the future of HTML5 and I'm not so sure there will be a reason to use these SWF->HTML5 converters other than maybe a head start on re-developing your application. Have you tried converting a PDF to word? Converters for proprietary technologies haven't proven to be very effective.
- whatever_dude 15y ago
  The problem with both converting SWF and PDF into more 'open' formats is not that they're proprietary (SWF specs are freely available no anyone; not sure about PDF) but that they're final formats. PDFs, for example, retain information about how something should be rendered, not edited; hence why blocks of text get cut when trying to convert it to anything (there's no text flow information). In the same way, images are downscaled, transparencies are flattened or rasterized, fonts are broken down... there's too much lost. A SWF is the same; it'd be better to work from original files and projects (similar to what Wallaby is trying, and maybe Hype?) to 'compile' everything to HTML5 (or whatever output format) than trying to transcode something from a format that was optimized for one specific kind of player.
jarek 15y ago
At this point I'm beginning to doubt we'll ever actually get to a fully cross-browser web. We've had two broad reboot attempts (first to "XHTML+CSS", the current one to "HTML5") and both times we ended up largely with a limited list of browsers and engines supported just as we had in the days of Netscape 4.x/IE4. The supported browsers are the cool browsers/engines of the day, which we then proceed to curse in three-four years. Only the names of the browsers change. Edit: heh, didn't even notice who I was replying to.

afhof 15y ago

Seems to be limited to 512kB. Thats not much of a demo.

thailandstartup 15y ago

It's counterintuitive but Adobe should be working on a project like this. A decent server side SWF->HTML5 would enable existing websites to offer the first class experience (the SWF) to Flash enabled browsers, and push a HTML5 conversion for non-Flash browsers (Apple mobile devices). It would shaft Apple (Why does this run so slow on the iPad?) and slow the move away from Flash (Adobe could still make a credible 'runs everywhere' argument).

jbwyme 15y ago
http://mashable.com/2011/03/08/adobe-wallaby/ http://mashable.com/2011/03/08/adobe-wallaby/
- thailandstartup 15y ago
  Wallaby is a feature of the IDE to publish as HTML5 - it doesn't seek to address all the SWF content that is already out there.

johnhenry 15y ago

I can't help but wonder if content owners might view this as a threat to the security of their flash creations. Afterall, this is essentially a decompiler, isn't it?

georgemcbay 15y ago
Plain Flash SWFs are trivial to decompile and decompilers have been available basically since the beginning of the platform. Anyone who really worries about that sort of thing is running their Flash output through obfuscators/minifiers similar to the ones available for JavaScript. With such obfuscated swfs you can still extract the code but it'll be basically an unmaintainable mess. I'm sure the output of such obfuscated code with this tool is just as bad as it would be if decompiling the bytecode to ActionScript, if not worse.
whatever_dude 15y ago
The SWF format is open (in the sense that it's a published spec) and many SWf decompilers already exist. This doesn't change anything in that regard.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

jvandenbroeck 15y ago

I don't know if that's a smart move from Google. It would be a good thing for Google to have users frustrated with Flash websites that don't work in iOS. Now they are helping Apple giving users a great experience on iOS?

watty 15y ago

I tried a handful of random SWF files from my dropbox and none of them worked. Several were due to AS 3.0, which isn't supported but even simplest animation said "The #initclip pragma is not supported.".

whatever_dude 15y ago
#initclip is an internal syntax used normally when using AS2 classes (it was auto-generated, although you could use it manually too), as it forced code to run before the normal execution cycle.

efnx 15y ago

The major downside is that most webshops are and have been using Actionscript 3 for the past 5 years. Has anyone compiled any AS3 with this?

efnx 15y ago
Here is the output after trying to convert one of my projects: 9-slice scaling is not supported. (11 occurrences) Pixel hinting on strokes is not supported. (10 occurrences) Filters are not supported. (100 occurrences) Shape tweens are not supported. (2 occurrences) ActionScript 3.0 is not supported. (2 occurrences) Advanced text rendering using continuous stroke modulation is not supported. (3 occurrences)
- hammock 15y ago
  Some more errors here, just so we can start compiling a list of what is unsupported: An unsupported SWF tag was encountered. (1 occurrences) The global ActionScript property _quality is not supported. (1 occurrences) Character glyphs aligned on pixel boundaries are not supported. (4 occurrences) The #initclip pragma is not supported. (23 occurrences) An unsupported audio codec was encountered. (1 occurrences)
  - joshuarrrr 15y ago
    A couple more: Miter limit will behave differently, as it will revert to bevel instead of cutting off the joint. (65 occurrences) Adjusting the font kerning within dynamic text is not supported. (7 occurrences)
whatever_dude 15y ago
Testing some (very) old SWF of mine: Custom font kerning is not supported. (2 occurrences) Streaming audio is not supported. (17 occurrences) Blend modes are not supported. (6 occurrences) Scenes are not supported. (1 occurrences) Filters are not supported. (426 occurrences) Adjusting the letter spacing within dynamic text is not supported. (1 occurrences) Advanced text rendering using continuous stroke modulation is not supported. (5 occurrences) ActionScript 3.0 is not supported. (2 occurrences)

fedorabbit 15y ago

My experience of HTML5 right now doesn't really have significant performance improvement compare to Flash, even on Mac OS X. I think it still has a long way to go. But it is nice to see someone's exploring the frontier! The blurring effect doesn't seem right though...

phoboslab 15y ago
That really depends on what you want to do. The drawing performance for the canvas element has been dramatically improved in the last few months - for desktop browsers at least. And then of course, there's WebGL; even if you just use it for 2D stuff (shameless plug: http://www.phoboslab.org/xtype/ http://www.phoboslab.org/xtype/ ) it's way faster than Flash. I have no doubt that in a few month the the 2D canvas context will have the exact same performance (if not better) as WebGL for 2D stuff.
cryptoz 15y ago
My experience of HTML5 is that it blows Flash out of the water. Flash on Linux is (still) an absolute disaster while HTML5 is making progress every day and has long surpassed Flash in usefulness for most tasks.
- tensor 15y ago
  I'm very skeptical. Claims like this never seem to be born out in actual benchmarks. http://pacoup.com/2011/02/03/flash-vs-html5-performance/ http://pacoup.com/2011/02/03/flash-vs-html5-performance/ http://www.craftymind.com/guimark3/ http://www.craftymind.com/guimark3/ The advantage of flash right now is that you can be reasonably sure that if a user has it installed, they will get a minimum set of features and performance. With HTML5, your complex app may run fine, or may not run at all, depending on the users implementation. I've no doubt the performance gap between flash and html5 will continue to narrow. However, I'm less sure that there is anything in the design of html5 that would allow for implementations that are significantly faster than flash allows for. Perhaps someone with deeper technical knowledge of the two could comment. HTML5 does have the advantage that it's an open platform, of course. Thus you are much more likely to actually see competing implementations of the standard.

pgbovine 15y ago

first paragraph of TFA: Last summer, an engineering intern named Pieter Senster joined the mobile advertising team to explore how we could display Flash animations on devices that don’t support Adobe Flash player. Pieter made such great progress that Google hired him full time and formed a team to work on the project. Swiffy was born! what an awesomely productive intern! now that's a way to secure yourself a full-time job!

smackfu 15y ago
That probably should say: "joined the mobile advertising team to explore how we could display Flash advertisements on devices that don’t support Adobe Flash player" Which is not really the cool HTML5 future anyone is looking for.
- spjwebster 15y ago
  Anyone who is looking for the "cool HTML5 future" to be ad-free is going to be bitterly disappointed. Online ads predated the ubiquity of Flash, and they'll be around long after Flash is forgotten.
  - noduerme 15y ago
    yeahhh... basically we can turn the last 15 years of annoying flash ads back into the modern equivalent of animated gifs. whoopee =)
    - jarek 15y ago
      At least animated GIFs are easy to disable and doing so tends to have less undesired effects than disabling Flash.
      - smackfu 15y ago
        At least animated GIFs are easy to disable and doing so tends to have less undesired effects than disabling Javascript. And since this is really replacing it with Javscript...

kachnuv_ocasek 15y ago

Great example of misuse of the HTML5 buzzword.

tolmasky 15y ago

How does this compare to Gordon? https://github.com/tobeytailor/gordon/wiki https://github.com/tobeytailor/gordon/wiki

EvilRyry 15y ago
Both are ways to play flash content without flash but the approaches are quite different. Gordon is a Flash runtime written in Javascript, allowing the browser to play SWFs. Swiffy is a tool separate from the browser that converts SWFs into a form usable by browsers (SVG and JS).

whatever_dude 15y ago

Reality check: like it says, it converts a subset of Flash 8 content. It means it converts a subset of content that was made for a version of Flash that is 6 years old (Flash 8 was released in 2005; Adobe is about to release Flash Player 11). Sorry, this is not the "Flash killer" you're looking for.

chc 15y ago
Maybe I haven't been paying enough attention, but Flash circa 2011 doesn't seem all that much better than Flash circa 2005. If it gets them on iPhones, I think most people would happily take Flash 8 and possibly not even notice the downgrade.
- whatever_dude 15y ago
  Everything from Flash Player 9 onwards: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash_Player#Release_history http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash_Player#Release_hist... Too much stuff to mention, but the new VM especially. I personally haven't been working with AS2 (the old VM) in 3 years. If one wants to create new content (and thus can "afford" to go back some versions) then this could be useful. Simple banners and whatnot maybe. But in that case, using many of the new HTML5 native editors is probably a better bet.

noduerme 15y ago

Sweet! So all the obnoxious animation and banner ads can be converted into "HTML5" that runs 3x slower and sucks up 80% of a dual core processor per ad...and NONE of the actual coding, deep interactivity or UI enhancements implied in the ECMA4/AS3 platform are included. Is this the shape of things to come? Let me off this stupid ride, google. I vote DuckDuckGo, pageranks based on qualified user responses regardless of crawlable content, interactivity with client-side languages and structures that can't necessarily be crawled by a bot script, and an end to a monolithic, archaic system of ranking up corporate garbage. BLOW ME, Google. Apple. HTML5 lovers. If anyone needs proof Flex/Flash won't be dead for a long time, here it is =)

lparry 15y ago
You're obviously a windows user (and a flash "developer"), because for people on every other platform it's flash that chews up 80%CPU time and runs dog slow. Maybe if adobe hadnt give every other platform such shitty implementations, there mightn't be so many people working towards killing it.

libria 15y ago

Cool. Now if we only had a Silverlight -> HTML5+js converter we could quell the Windows 8 uproar.

johnx123 15y ago

Bloated code http://swiffy.googlelabs.com/gallery/example1_swiffy.html http://swiffy.googlelabs.com/gallery/example1_swiffy.html