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Mozilla's Open Source Project Shumway To Translate SWF To HTML5
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.
ALF, is that you?
Google has a project going along these lines, called Swiffy. Looking at the demos, it appears to work pretty well.
If it can translate every game and movie on e.g. Newgrounds, and be playable, then it's awesome!
The racing demo is the only one that worked for me. The other two examples did not work. Still pretty neat
I guess it's a good thing API's can't be copyrighted or this would have been DOA. Perhaps Adobe could get behind this as well. What could be better than still being able to sell your developer tools for Flash and not have to create clients for all the different platforms anymore.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
I can't wait to watch Shumway on Shumway...
Whatever you think about Mozilla's products, experiments or strategies, they are working for a free web.
It's more than admirable, it's good for the web to have them around.
Now we only need a project that converts HTML5 to something that can be rendered uniformly on all major browsers.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
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 :-)
Now we only have a project that converts HTML5 to something that can be rendered on IE
FTFY^2: Google Chrome Frame is a browser helper object for IE that allows web sites to tell iexplore.exe to render them in Chrome's version of WebKit instead of Trident.
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.
The Macromedia Flash interpreter gets more done with less code than almost anything else in computing today. Until a few years ago, the executable was under 1MB. The file structure allows execution before the entire file has been read in. The timeline and assets stream organization makes this possible. It's an elegant little system for doing animation with a low-bandwidth stream. Yes, today it tends to be used mostly for its video codec, but that's an artifact of YouTube. (And the fact that Apple turned the QuickTime plug-in into a way to force people to install iTunes.)
The Flash format isn't even proprietary. There are third-party Flash interpreters. They're widely used for the 2D interface components of video games.