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Smokescreen, a JavaScript-Based Flash Player

Posted by kdawson on from the now-to-optimize dept.

Tumbleweed writes "How to make Steve Jobs your mortal enemy: Smokescreen, a 175KB, 8,000-line JavaScript-based Flash player written by Chris Smoak at RevShock, a mobile ad startup, and to be open-sourced 'in the near future.' From Simon's blog: 'It runs entirely in the browser, reads in SWF binaries, unzips them (in native JS), extracts images and embedded audio, and turns them into base64 encoded data: URIs, then stitches the vector graphics back together as animated SVG. ... Smokescreen even implements its own ActionScript bytecode interpreter.' Badass!"

4 of 356 comments (clear)

  1. Impressive by Dan+East · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Very impressive! However, given Flash's performance issues even when compiled natively for mobile devices, this is more of a proof of concept then something usable.

    --
    Better known as 318230.
    1. Re:Impressive by bsDaemon · · Score: 5, Insightful

      most people or most nerds? I don't think most people even get ABP, even if they run Firefox, let alone actually know what Javascript is or that its something that can be disabled. Turn off JS these days, and practically nothing works. better would be a plug-in which just prevents Smokescreen from being loaded in particular.

  2. No, they'll be Steve Jobs' Best Friend by mveloso · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Jobs doesn't care about flash content, he cares about flash. If the flash content can be used without flash itself, well, that'd be great.

    Not sure why, but slashdot's headline writers are starting to sound more and more like tabloid writers. Why not say "Smokescreen to Adobe: flash off!"

    1. Re:No, they'll be Steve Jobs' Best Friend by famanz · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Jobs doesn't care about flash content, he cares about flash.

      Sorry but that's just not true. Did you miss the recent uproar about the new iPhone SDK agreement? The new agreement bans any applications that were not natively written in C/C++/Objective C. This updated agreement was released only weeks before Adobe CS5 was to debut with advanced tools that would allow the porting of flash apps to the iPhone. If flash itself was the problem then such a clause would not have been added.