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Probably because Flash isn't as relevant as it used to be. Years ago poor Flash support was a dealbreaker for a lot of people that might have switched to Linux,

Probably because Flash isn't as relevant as it used to be. Years ago poor Flash support was a dealbreaker for a lot of people that might have switched to Linux, which provided a strong raison d'être for open source Flash replacements. Nowadays, due to popular platforms like iOS with no Flash support, few sites rely on Flash for core functionality (though you still have cases like video quality being better for Youtube on Firefox with Flash because of the licensing issues with H264, most regular users won't notice this). "Millennials" (or whatever the fuck people in their 20s now are supposed to be called) that want to keep Homestar Runner alive are probably the biggest group that cares about having an open source Flash runtime today. I still like Flash. It helped a lot of kids (myself included) get into computers, its authorship tools allowed non-programmers to create a lot of really cool animations and interactive things over the years, and technically it's still ahead of HTML5 in a lot of ways (the gap is slowly shrinking due to Adobe's stupefying negligence and apathy for the platform, but I still find that most websites with even the slightest hint of superfluous animation lurch and stutter embarrassingly today on my fairly decked-out PC compared to full-blown Flash animations on my Pentium). If Adobe hadn't bought Macromedia, and if their management had had the good sense to release the source to the Flash player client, I think the web would be in a much better place right now.

pjmlp 12y ago
It will only stop being relevant when I can get my TV shows and online movies.
- masukomi 12y ago
  you can get your tv shows and online movies. You could even before the internet. If you mean, when you can get them without flash then you can do that too. Netflix, Hulu, and iTunes all work on iOS without flash.
  - pjmlp 12y ago
    All the web sites on my country use Flash for streaming movies and shows. Netflix and Hulu don't know where most European countries are, including mine. I don't intend to ever install iTunes on my computers or own an iOS device.
    - woah 12y ago
      Curious why not?
      - pjmlp 12y ago
        Easy. iTunes just feels bloated on Windows and doesn't exist for GNU/Linux. iOS devices cost insane prices outside contract for a smartphone. As I am not willing to pay more than 300€, even if that isn't a problem to me. As many fellow Europeans I don't do contracts. As a developer, iOS is a more closed system than Android and Windows Phone are. Specially how information gets in and out of the device without gatekeeper software like iTunes. I don't intend to pay for an Apple system just to develop for iOS, given that I work with UNIX/Windows systems so I already have enough hardware at home. Finally, on my home country, iOS devices are third place given their cost vs the average income.
aikah 12y ago
Would make more sense for adobe to allow exporting flash projects in webtechs directly(without hacks like today's export feature).Because Shumway isnt going to run FLV videos or do sound synthesis. > I still like Flash. Me too.Though I moved to js,processing and openframework for multimedia projects.Flash IDE is still one of the best tool to learn programming.I would have hated learning programming through javascript frankly. > Adobe's stupefying negligence and apathy for the platform Yeah,that's insane.They had a huge community and they just blew it. Again,as I said earlier the whole emscripten toolchain + WebGL could still make Flash IDE relevant in the future,but I doubt Adobe wants to throw more money at it.They fired most of the flash team and outsourced the rest to India.
- misuba 12y ago
  There's no reason Shumway couldn't do sound synthesis on today's Web Audio API.
  - aikah 12y ago
    I see very little point in Shumway.It will run most swf so slow it wont be really usable in a professional context. Start from scratch.Use WebGL and emscriptem.Write a flash like IDE that uses C++ or a safe language that compiles with the LLVM toolchain.Make flash without flash,backed by webtechs instead writing an emulator or that's just cargo culting.
    - mbebenita 12y ago
      ActionScript compiled to JS is not the performance bottleneck. In many cases it is faster than ActionScript ever was simply because of the huge investment most browser vendors have put into their JS engines. Flash-like vector graphics is what's hard to emulate on the web today. If you only care about moving spites around, then Flash, Shumway and C++/OpenGL will be mostly GPU bound. Flash got a lot of things right, both the SWF file format and the authoring tools are pretty good. There's not much sense in re-inventing it (we could do without ActionScript though).
seanp2k2 12y ago
The performance/UX thing always got me too, and I remember creating Flash content on a 500mhz P3 on XP which ran smoother than some sites these days on a mid-2014 quad-core rMBP. It still feels like we should have made more progress in terms of things /feeling/ faster over the past 10+ years than we have. Somewhat OT, but if you've ever watched medical office secretaries, airline desk people, bank tellers, or some hotel clerks work, you'd never think of switching them to a newer computer and web-apps; their proprietary terminal stuff works nearly instantly for most things they need to do. It's sad that the best web experiences today can still be an order of magnitude slower than that.
mahmoudimus 12y ago
You're right. However, I find projects like this relevant as a way to enable sites that do utilize Flash, fallback gracefully to devices that do not have Flash support, even if it's at the cost of performance.
- ANTSANTS 12y ago
  Oh yeah, totally. I also want a good open source Flash player so that some day, when Adobe finally pulls the plug, all of the stupid .swfs I've saved over the years will remain viewable. I'm just saying that it hasn't been a pressing issue for the "year of the Linux desktop" crowd for a while now.
cwyers 12y ago
Funny that you mention Homestar Runner -- I've recently introduced my daughter to that site, and she loves it. And while I'm watching her play with it, I marvel at how that kind of rich interactive experience (the sbemails with clickable text Easter Eggs, for instance) was available back then, and it seems like we've pretty much backslid from the functionality of a site like that with HTML5 -- if it's available in HTML5 and Javascript, it's still nowhere near as easy for nonprogrammers to author that kind of content without Flash.
- woah 12y ago
  I'm interested in seeing some sort of solid documentation on the claims that flash has wildly better performance than JS. It kind of matches my experience with computers in the 90s and I'd really like to find out how much better it is, and why.
  - mbebenita 12y ago
    Flash has a retained mode graphics API and a fantastic scan-line rasterizer. Each pixel is drawn once which is not the case for HTML Canvas where there is usually a lot of overdraw. It's all about graphics perf, not AS3 vs JS anymore.
    - woah 12y ago
      Could one somehow implement something similar on top of canvas, saving the renderer from doing all that extra work?
viraptor 12y ago
> Probably because Flash isn't as relevant as it used to be. That's not the angle I was going for actually. If Flash isn't as relevant now, why start a new implementation at all? Is someone wants to do it for fun, then sure. But it isn't even an interesting research project. Lightspark came the closest with actual GPU acceleration. Porting to JS is just a blind port. It makes me not trust this as a viable future implementation, if none of the previous ports came even close to relevant.

pjmlp 12y ago

It will only stop being relevant when I can get my TV shows and online movies.

masukomi 12y ago
you can get your tv shows and online movies. You could even before the internet. If you mean, when you can get them without flash then you can do that too. Netflix, Hulu, and iTunes all work on iOS without flash.
- pjmlp 12y ago
  All the web sites on my country use Flash for streaming movies and shows. Netflix and Hulu don't know where most European countries are, including mine. I don't intend to ever install iTunes on my computers or own an iOS device.
  - woah 12y ago
    Curious why not?
    - pjmlp 12y ago
      Easy. iTunes just feels bloated on Windows and doesn't exist for GNU/Linux. iOS devices cost insane prices outside contract for a smartphone. As I am not willing to pay more than 300€, even if that isn't a problem to me. As many fellow Europeans I don't do contracts. As a developer, iOS is a more closed system than Android and Windows Phone are. Specially how information gets in and out of the device without gatekeeper software like iTunes. I don't intend to pay for an Apple system just to develop for iOS, given that I work with UNIX/Windows systems so I already have enough hardware at home. Finally, on my home country, iOS devices are third place given their cost vs the average income.

aikah 12y ago

Would make more sense for adobe to allow exporting flash projects in webtechs directly(without hacks like today's export feature).Because Shumway isnt going to run FLV videos or do sound synthesis. > I still like Flash. Me too.Though I moved to js,processing and openframework for multimedia projects.Flash IDE is still one of the best tool to learn programming.I would have hated learning programming through javascript frankly. > Adobe's stupefying negligence and apathy for the platform Yeah,that's insane.They had a huge community and they just blew it. Again,as I said earlier the whole emscripten toolchain + WebGL could still make Flash IDE relevant in the future,but I doubt Adobe wants to throw more money at it.They fired most of the flash team and outsourced the rest to India.

misuba 12y ago
There's no reason Shumway couldn't do sound synthesis on today's Web Audio API.
- aikah 12y ago
  I see very little point in Shumway.It will run most swf so slow it wont be really usable in a professional context. Start from scratch.Use WebGL and emscriptem.Write a flash like IDE that uses C++ or a safe language that compiles with the LLVM toolchain.Make flash without flash,backed by webtechs instead writing an emulator or that's just cargo culting.
  - mbebenita 12y ago
    ActionScript compiled to JS is not the performance bottleneck. In many cases it is faster than ActionScript ever was simply because of the huge investment most browser vendors have put into their JS engines. Flash-like vector graphics is what's hard to emulate on the web today. If you only care about moving spites around, then Flash, Shumway and C++/OpenGL will be mostly GPU bound. Flash got a lot of things right, both the SWF file format and the authoring tools are pretty good. There's not much sense in re-inventing it (we could do without ActionScript though).

seanp2k2 12y ago

The performance/UX thing always got me too, and I remember creating Flash content on a 500mhz P3 on XP which ran smoother than some sites these days on a mid-2014 quad-core rMBP. It still feels like we should have made more progress in terms of things /feeling/ faster over the past 10+ years than we have. Somewhat OT, but if you've ever watched medical office secretaries, airline desk people, bank tellers, or some hotel clerks work, you'd never think of switching them to a newer computer and web-apps; their proprietary terminal stuff works nearly instantly for most things they need to do. It's sad that the best web experiences today can still be an order of magnitude slower than that.

mahmoudimus 12y ago

You're right. However, I find projects like this relevant as a way to enable sites that do utilize Flash, fallback gracefully to devices that do not have Flash support, even if it's at the cost of performance.

ANTSANTS 12y ago
Oh yeah, totally. I also want a good open source Flash player so that some day, when Adobe finally pulls the plug, all of the stupid .swfs I've saved over the years will remain viewable. I'm just saying that it hasn't been a pressing issue for the "year of the Linux desktop" crowd for a while now.

cwyers 12y ago

Funny that you mention Homestar Runner -- I've recently introduced my daughter to that site, and she loves it. And while I'm watching her play with it, I marvel at how that kind of rich interactive experience (the sbemails with clickable text Easter Eggs, for instance) was available back then, and it seems like we've pretty much backslid from the functionality of a site like that with HTML5 -- if it's available in HTML5 and Javascript, it's still nowhere near as easy for nonprogrammers to author that kind of content without Flash.

woah 12y ago
I'm interested in seeing some sort of solid documentation on the claims that flash has wildly better performance than JS. It kind of matches my experience with computers in the 90s and I'd really like to find out how much better it is, and why.
- mbebenita 12y ago
  Flash has a retained mode graphics API and a fantastic scan-line rasterizer. Each pixel is drawn once which is not the case for HTML Canvas where there is usually a lot of overdraw. It's all about graphics perf, not AS3 vs JS anymore.
  - woah 12y ago
    Could one somehow implement something similar on top of canvas, saving the renderer from doing all that extra work?

viraptor 12y ago

> Probably because Flash isn't as relevant as it used to be. That's not the angle I was going for actually. If Flash isn't as relevant now, why start a new implementation at all? Is someone wants to do it for fun, then sure. But it isn't even an interesting research project. Lightspark came the closest with actual GPU acceleration. Porting to JS is just a blind port. It makes me not trust this as a viable future implementation, if none of the previous ports came even close to relevant.