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Open-Source JavaScript Flash Player (HTML5/SVG)

Posted by Soulskill on from the it's-called-gordon-get-it dept.

gbutler69 writes "Someone has gone and done it. Tobias Schneider has created a Flash player written in JavaScript targeting SVG/HTML5-capable browsers. It's not a complete implementation yet, but it shows real promise. A few demos have been posted online. How long before HTML5/SVG next-generation browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari, Epiphany, and other Web-Kit based browsers completely supplant Flash and Silverlight/Moonlight?"

6 of 300 comments (clear)

  1. Re:This is great! by sopssa · · Score: 4, Informative

    Welcome back to 2008. There was major improvement in javascript engines during 2009 in all other browsers than IE and Firefox. Chrome and Opera have incredibly fast javascript renderers and they're pushing it even more in next Opera version.

  2. Re:This is great! by TheRaven64 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Why? Most of what a Flash applet does is run ActionScript, which is a dialect of JavaScript. The drawing in this will be done by the browser, rather than by a plugin, and the code will be run by the browser's JavaScript engine instead of the plugin's one. If anything, you'll see less memory usage because you'll only need one JavaScript VM instead of two.

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  3. Checked out the demos on my iphone by Anonymusing · · Score: 4, Informative

    I checked out the posted demos on my iPhone. Although they were a tad sluggish (particularly the star fade-in on the first demo), frankly, it wasn't bad. Some of the sluggishness could have just been because the demos are getting Slashdotted.

    Personally, I'm a little more interested in PhoneGap, which lets you use JavaScript to create iPhone apps (outside the browser).

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  4. Re:This is great! by the+roAm · · Score: 4, Informative

    It's not odd, it's SVG. Rendering SVGs, especially ones with lots of lines and not a lot of solid shapes is quite CPU intensive.

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  5. Before you get all excited... by Qubit · · Score: 5, Informative

    ...according to the article his code only supports the SWF 1.0 format, and he's currently working on adding support for the SWF 2.0 file format.

    Adobe Flash 1 and Flash 2 (which I'm going to guess might roughly line up with SWF 1.0 and 2.0), were released in 1996 and 1997, respectively. As in, over a decade ago.

    Much larger, more long-term projects like Gnash have been working on completing a compliant Flash client for several years and still don't have support through Flash 8, 9, and 10. It's apparently a lot of work to support all of the different pieces of Flash, especially as it turns out that the SWF spec has been completely overhauled several times over the past decade, resulting in wide differences between things like ActionScript 1, 2, and 3.

    So while I wish this effort all the best, it would require a lot of time/energy/talent to make this client have the coverage necessary for, say, internet video sites to work.

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  6. Re:Now if they could by clang_jangle · · Score: 5, Informative

    flash based cookies, which are not that easy to block and/or delete for the user, are used by all advertisers and other bastards, spying on you

    Trivial to defeat, at least in *.nix. Just remove all write permissions to the ~/.adobe and ~/.macromedia directories, after deleting all the cookies within. Buh-bye, flash cookies. Also makes flash work noticeably faster.

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