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Mozilla's Open Source Project Shumway To Translate SWF To HTML5

Posted by timothy on from the why-don't-you-render-off-site-and-pay-for-it? dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla currently has an experimental project on github called Shumway to try to interpret SWF (aka Flash files) using browser-standard technologies like HTML5 and JavaScript. All I can say is please and thank you! 'Shumway is an HTML5 technology experiment that explores building a faithful and efficient renderer for the SWF file format without native code assistance. Shumway is community-driven and supported by Mozilla. Our goal is to create a general-purpose, web standards-based platform for parsing and rendering SWFs. Integration with Firefox is a possibility if the experiment proves successful.'" It's not the first such attempt; here's a post from a few years back about one called Smokescreen, and another about QuickTime programmer Steve Perlman's subscription-based workaround for iDevices.

2 of 57 comments (clear)

  1. Google Swiffy by aaron44126 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Google has a project going along these lines, called Swiffy. Looking at the demos, it appears to work pretty well.

  2. Re:Yeah right.... by tlhIngan · · Score: 3, Informative

    Quite funny how Steve Jobs decided not to support Flash on iOS because it was such a resource hog, consuming way too much processor power, and now people are going to try and get around that restriction by... making a flash interpreter in html5 :-)

    Except it's a lot easier for a browser to control resource usage by controlling its renderer and interpreter than blindly giving cycles to a black box plugin (which is how plugins worked - by sending periodic events to embedded plugins to let them process).

    And a browser has a lot finer grained security and privacy controls - if you say a site may NOT store a cookie (like Google DoubleClick), they can always use Flash as a workaround to that because Flash doesn't have easy support for it (it's all cookies, no cookies, or "annoy the hell out of me"). In the browser, you say no and the browser ensures it. Flash fixed that but it's still ages behind modern browsers.

    Heck, a browser can also let you "do not run any javascript or other crap from doubleclick" but Flash will just happily load it up if the SWF references it.