4 ms·

this project is a waste of time. The problem is not the player , but how flash can output content that use standard browser apis. This kind of emulation is a g

by camus 14y ago

this project is a waste of time. The problem is not the player , but how flash can output content that use standard browser apis. This kind of emulation is a good demo , but doesnt work in the real world. Why whould i use that ? old browser will never support that tech ( < IE9 ) but they support flash , recent browsers dont need flash , what's the point ? It makes more sense to build tools similar to flash IDE that can export to HTML5 than wasting time trying to make legacy code run slow and blow up to the user's face ... been there , done that ...

chadaustin 14y ago
It's not a waste of time for two reasons: 1) If it works, then it shows how far browser technology has come. Real examples are meaningful. 2) SWF files are content. In a Flash-less world we'd have no ability to experience Dice Wars or most Kongregate games or http://raditts.com/phyles/xiao3.swf http://raditts.com/phyles/xiao3.swf Consider this project an emulator for old things. :)
- async5 14y ago
  > or http://raditts.com/phyles/xiao3.swf http://raditts.com/phyles/xiao3.swf I was looking for this movie. Thanks!
BrendanEich 14y ago
Platforms where Flash is not supported by Adobe, or not allowed by the OS vendor: - Linux - Win8 Metro, depending on the whitelist contents - iPad - iPhone - FirefoxOS (neé B2G) As Stan the Man says, 'nuff said! /be
- caiob 14y ago
  Thanks SJ.
- mesh 14y ago
  Just to clarify, those are Platforms where the Flash Player / Browser plugin is not supported or available. You can use the Flash development and authoring toolchain to develop content for many of those platforms.
- camus 14y ago
  My point is we dont need yet another emulator , but tools that help dev/designer/whatever great great content for the web. Nobody wants to run legacy code forever ,and i'm sorry , but the emulator doesnt work on any of my devices. So stop wasting your time , create software that people can use, not emulators nobody's going to run.
- cmccabe 14y ago
  I think we pretty much all agree that flash is dead on mobile. That includes iPad, iPhone, Android, and so forth. On the desktop, it's a bit of a different story. Chrome supports Flash on Linux quite well. Internet Explorer also has Flash baked in. There is some whitelisting if you are in "tablet mode"-- or so I am told. It seems like for a normal computer you should be able to turn off tablet mode, though. I wish Mozilla had put some effort into contributing to Gnash or swfdec. There really wasn't, and isn't, a good flash decoder that isn't derived from Adobe's codebase. All the ones that exist now are toys. I have a feeling that this effort will be no different. I hope I'm wrong.
  - BrendanEich 14y ago
    I wish I had a dollar for every time someone wished that Mozilla did more anti-leveraged work in the past. @supercoder's point about skating where the puck used to be has truth in it, and we do not aim to over-invest in Flash via Shumway now (and we avoided it before; perhaps we should have done more, but the only temporarily-winning effort I know of was Chrome's, which required a business deal with Adobe and a tremendous amount of engineering effort on Google's side). On the other hand, as Jet Villegas's blog post points out, we also uplift the web and smooth out uneven APIs and performance curves by researching Shumway. If Flash requires some greater JS performance, or some API gap to be filled, Shumway is the most direct way to find out. It's well within Mozilla Research's ambit, and not backward-looking, to explore this space. Finally, if we can deploy Shumway as a previewer and reduce actual Flashplayer plugin instantiations greatly, with as good or better user experience in terms of jank, CPU utilization, battery life, etc. -- and with some black-video-frame-of-death saves on my iPad, should Shumway be supported there -- that helps in the coming years as Flash lingers on in the "desktop web". But make no mistake: the growth curve for mobile devices and the lack of Flash there will kill Flash. All those restaurant sites that sunk their discretionary web content development budgets in Flash years ago? They are re-investing rapidly to work on iOS devices. I don't see Flash rallying on desktop, or even via Air on Android. Add this all up and I believe Shumway can avoid the forever-a-toy status. Flash is proprietary tech, in spite of SWF being opened up in recent years. Its single main implementation code is its spec. This hurts when the single implementation is evolving rapidly, but as that implementation slows down and (outside of Air and games, let's say) declines, the 90%-coverage "toys" become real tools, with the right integration. This could have applied to Gnash or swfdec in the past, but at significantly higher cost, not only in direct engineering costs and opportunity costs to web-perf/API-uplift, but also in securing yet more piles of native VM code. /be

by camus 14y ago

chadaustin 14y ago

It's not a waste of time for two reasons: 1) If it works, then it shows how far browser technology has come. Real examples are meaningful. 2) SWF files are content. In a Flash-less world we'd have no ability to experience Dice Wars or most Kongregate games or http://raditts.com/phyles/xiao3.swf http://raditts.com/phyles/xiao3.swf Consider this project an emulator for old things. :)

async5 14y ago
> or http://raditts.com/phyles/xiao3.swf http://raditts.com/phyles/xiao3.swf I was looking for this movie. Thanks!

BrendanEich 14y ago

Platforms where Flash is not supported by Adobe, or not allowed by the OS vendor: - Linux - Win8 Metro, depending on the whitelist contents - iPad - iPhone - FirefoxOS (neé B2G) As Stan the Man says, 'nuff said! /be

caiob 14y ago
Thanks SJ.
mesh 14y ago
Just to clarify, those are Platforms where the Flash Player / Browser plugin is not supported or available. You can use the Flash development and authoring toolchain to develop content for many of those platforms.
camus 14y ago
My point is we dont need yet another emulator , but tools that help dev/designer/whatever great great content for the web. Nobody wants to run legacy code forever ,and i'm sorry , but the emulator doesnt work on any of my devices. So stop wasting your time , create software that people can use, not emulators nobody's going to run.
cmccabe 14y ago
I think we pretty much all agree that flash is dead on mobile. That includes iPad, iPhone, Android, and so forth. On the desktop, it's a bit of a different story. Chrome supports Flash on Linux quite well. Internet Explorer also has Flash baked in. There is some whitelisting if you are in "tablet mode"-- or so I am told. It seems like for a normal computer you should be able to turn off tablet mode, though. I wish Mozilla had put some effort into contributing to Gnash or swfdec. There really wasn't, and isn't, a good flash decoder that isn't derived from Adobe's codebase. All the ones that exist now are toys. I have a feeling that this effort will be no different. I hope I'm wrong.
- BrendanEich 14y ago
  I wish I had a dollar for every time someone wished that Mozilla did more anti-leveraged work in the past. @supercoder's point about skating where the puck used to be has truth in it, and we do not aim to over-invest in Flash via Shumway now (and we avoided it before; perhaps we should have done more, but the only temporarily-winning effort I know of was Chrome's, which required a business deal with Adobe and a tremendous amount of engineering effort on Google's side). On the other hand, as Jet Villegas's blog post points out, we also uplift the web and smooth out uneven APIs and performance curves by researching Shumway. If Flash requires some greater JS performance, or some API gap to be filled, Shumway is the most direct way to find out. It's well within Mozilla Research's ambit, and not backward-looking, to explore this space. Finally, if we can deploy Shumway as a previewer and reduce actual Flashplayer plugin instantiations greatly, with as good or better user experience in terms of jank, CPU utilization, battery life, etc. -- and with some black-video-frame-of-death saves on my iPad, should Shumway be supported there -- that helps in the coming years as Flash lingers on in the "desktop web". But make no mistake: the growth curve for mobile devices and the lack of Flash there will kill Flash. All those restaurant sites that sunk their discretionary web content development budgets in Flash years ago? They are re-investing rapidly to work on iOS devices. I don't see Flash rallying on desktop, or even via Air on Android. Add this all up and I believe Shumway can avoid the forever-a-toy status. Flash is proprietary tech, in spite of SWF being opened up in recent years. Its single main implementation code is its spec. This hurts when the single implementation is evolving rapidly, but as that implementation slows down and (outside of Air and games, let's say) declines, the 90%-coverage "toys" become real tools, with the right integration. This could have applied to Gnash or swfdec in the past, but at significantly higher cost, not only in direct engineering costs and opportunity costs to web-perf/API-uplift, but also in securing yet more piles of native VM code. /be