Smokescreen, a JavaScript-Based Flash Player

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!"

Comments

Impressive

[Dan East]

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.

Re:Impressive

[bsDaemon]

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.

Re:Impressive

[Dan East]

Unfortunately, you're exactly right. From the blog:

(sic)"It’s stated intention is to allow Flash banner ads to execute on the iPad and iPhone, but there are plenty of other interesting applications (such as news site infographics)."

There would be a lot of money to be made in cajoling those flash-based banner ads onto iPad / iPhone. Yep, lots o' money...

Re:Impressive

[JackAxe]

Flash 10.1 runs quite well on my Nexus One. Overall its performance is excellent for being beta and for me it's been a non-issue.

The mobile player uses the GPU for both animation(vector, bitmap, etc.) and video playback. JavaScript also runs fast on my Nexus, but when compared to Flash 10.1, it's downright slow.

Re:Impressive

[jmorris42]

> Honestly, I think this will force most people to turn Javascript off if nothing else.

Which just might be the point. Turn JS off and the browsing experience is degraded to the point of unusability on most of the current net. So now the choice is Flash delivered via the plugin or Flash delivered via this JS thing which will be REALLY slow and make i* products look underpowered when compared to competing products viewing the same content. Game, Set and Match. Flash is now going to run on Apple products, His Steveness's only remaining choice is does he want it to run well or not.

Re:Impressive

[nine-times]

Oh, thanks helpfriendinator. Without your inforeply I wouldn't have been able to think outside the box to architect a synergistic model of Web 2.0 paradigms that enable me to comprehend the emergent properties of the cloud.

Apple just updated its EUA...

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple just updated its EUA to exclude javascript, Steve Jobs reports that this will improve the user experience

No, they'll be Steve Jobs' Best Friend

[mveloso]

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!"

Re:No, they'll be Steve Jobs' Best Friend

[famanz]

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.

Gordon?

[Jorl17]

What about Gordon? That one *is* open-source. Is it different from what TFS refers to in terms of goals (not current state)?

Rube Goldberg

[MrTripps]

It opens SWF binaries, unzips them (in native JS),follows a little ball down a wire track, knocks over domino that begins a chain of falling dominoes, the last of which frightens a chicken into laying an egg, which rolls down a ramp, cracks into a frying pan, flipped by a spring loaded spatula onto a plate with bacon attached to a remote control car, that drives it to the kitchen table. Then a counter weight pulls up the plate, puts on the table, then extracts images and embedded audio and turns them into base64 encoded data. That is a lot of trouble just because Jobs is being prissy about what runs on his over priced under powered eye candy.

And Adobe can't do this, why?

[tk77]

This works pretty well under the released version of Safari for OSX 10.6. In fact, in some of the samples where the flash version is provided as well, the Flash ones use more CPU then the HTML5 ones.

There is a bit of degradation in some of the graphics, but hey its better then not seeing the graphics (ok, that really depends ... if its an ad and you prefer not to see it ... whatever).

Now the question is, why can't Adobe add a feature to the Flash authoring tool to just output the HTML5 and whatever is needed, that smokescreen does in the browser?

From some of the samples it would seem like you could just "drop in" the converted version with minimal loss of quality and reach a much larger audience.

I would still prefer Flash, for the most part, go away, and this won't help that too much (initially anyway). But it seems like this would be a good way for many web sites to start using HTML5 now, while support and implementations mature, as well as giving all the Flash devs time to learn to write natively in HTML5.