Shumway: Mozilla Does An Open-Source SWF Runtime

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Shumway: Mozilla Does An Open-Source SWF Runtime

Mozilla announced Shumway this week, a new research project that seeks to create an open SWF (Adobe Flash) run-time environment to make Flash more open and for exposing SWF capabilities to platforms where the Adobe file-format wasn't backed by an official Flash Player...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTIyODY

[89c51]

WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY

I mean yes flash is a technology still used mainly in pornography websites and websites designed by idiots but it goes away. Mozilla (and google/youtube + porn sites) should start pushing open web formats aggressively (ie not use webm as a fallback and disable it for monetized videos on youtube). Also we should get rid of h264 and shit like that from the web.

[dstaubsauger]

@89c51

you are aware of the fact that swf is not a video codec?

[89c51]

@89c51

you are aware of the fact that swf is not a video codec?

Yes the rant was about flash in general. We've seen games in html5 and other funky stuff -even thought i find the "works with chrome" thing utterly stupid.

We need an open web -yes i know the flash spec was opened and anyone can implement it- thats all.

[uid313]

Is it porno-compatible?

My only use for Flash is porno.

[Kivada]

Is it porno-compatible?

My only use for Flash is porno.

Theres a little know site called https://thepiratebay.se/ where you can find all the porn on earth for free and you don't need Flash installed to access it.

[elanthis]

We've seen games in html5 and other funky stuff -even thought i find the "works with chrome" thing utterly stupid.

Make the other browsers besides Chrome actually be able to run games properly, and that'd go away. We ported some of our HTML5 games work last year, and the speed on Firefox and Safari was just pathetic. It's doubly funny because at the time Firefox was leading the JS performance benchmarks. Problem is, games (and real apps in general) aren't micro-benchmarks, and Chrome devs put a lot of work into optimizing Google's real-world large-scale apps.

It was doubly confusing since Chrome's <canvas> implementation at the time was pure software, and Firefox had some low-end hardware accel. Either their hardware accel was the usual Open Source 2D rendering quality (e.g., slower than software, because they don't understand GPUs or how to use them for 2D rendering) or V8 really was just that much faster for game code than the competition. Those fun-looking image/audio DSP kernels that Mozilla used to advertise their JS speed ("faster than C!") really have nothing to do with real-world use cases, alas.

[aironeous]

It is extremely annoying to not have flash on my mobile browser, extremely. It basically blocks you from seeing a huge amount of videos and content.

[ChrisXY]

you are aware of the fact that swf is not a video codec?

I'd estimate 99% of my flash usage is watching videos.

The sad thing is, that adobe themselves did say that the flash plugin is not for solving the problem of playing videos.
https://blogs.adobe.com/penguinswf/2..._problems.html

They still don't seem to realize that (my estimation 95% of users only ever want to watch flash videos with it. They should have made a "flashplugin light" that was only capable of video playback and solving that problem efficiently.
That would have the advantage of making the flash advertisement garbage go away. Without ads this phoronix article makes chromium consume about 0% CPU on my 3632qm, with flash ads, chromium consumes accumulated about 10 to 20% CPU (of one core). I wonder how much energy humanity could have saved not having flash ads. I mean, not even not clogging the bandwidth with ads, just the client pcs not displaying them.
Not only do the ads waste energy and bandwidth compared to text ads, they also most often destroy or compromise the layout and are just plain ugly.

I mean, what the fuck.


So I would like a flash player that only is capable of playing flash content.

Maybe the approach of Shumway is modular enough so that you can restrict the code loading to that code that plays videos.

[RealNC]

I hope you guys know that pr0n is responsible for killing several formats, right? If something's not compatible with porn, it's not going to succeed, even if it's 10 times better than a porn-compatible format. Good examples are Beta vs VHS and HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray.