The Shumway Open SWF Runtime Project

theweatherelectric writes "Mozilla is looking for contributors interested in working on Shumway. Mozilla's Jet Villegas writes, 'Shumway is an experimental web-native (Javascript) runtime implementation of the SWF file format. It is developed as a free and open source project sponsored by Mozilla Research. The project has two main goals: 1. Advance the open web platform to securely process rich media formats that were previously only available in closed and proprietary implementations. 2. Offer a runtime processor for SWF and other rich media formats on platforms for which runtime implementations are not available.'" See also: Gnash and Lightspark.

Comments

Bugs in the demo

[HatofPig]

In the race card demo the "best lap" time is actually just your last lap. And when you finish all 10 laps the clock doesn't stop, so your "final time" keeps increasing. I wonder if this is a bug in Shumway or the game itself. And I only get around 7 FPS on average, on Firefox in Linux/x86.

Oh, boy!

[93 Escort Wagon]

Having experienced just how slowly pdf.js renders documents longer than a page or two - I can't WAIT to see how well implementing swf in javascript goes!

Re:Oh, boy!

[tlhIngan]

I block flash and I block javascript. I only whitelist js for certain sites but mostly, its all blocked.

Which is why a browser-based method is better than a plugin-based method for stuff that Flash does. After all, if you allow Flash for one site, who knows what sorts of Javascript and resources it pulls from other sites?

But a browser based version or HTML5 means site-specific restrictions are honored - a Flash video that wants to pull in javascript from ad trackers can do it via the Flash plugin, but if it was in HTML5 or a browser implementation, will still remain blocked.

Does this mean we could possibly have CONTROL?

[fishnuts]

Does this mean developers might actually implement 'MUTE', 'FORCE STOP', or 'RESTART' context menu items for shockwave apps? I despise going to read a page with ads and other shockwave sidebar widgets that make noise or chew up CPU cycles and have no way to pause/mute/stop them. It also bugs that you must reload the entire page to get a flash app to restart.

It's beyond me why Macromedia/Adobe never wanted us to have those essential controls. The only thing we get, in some rare cases, are the ability to prevent the app/player from looping, or to turn down rendering quality.

Re:Sounds great, would prefer ActionScript / Flex

[drkstr1]

We got our first "no flash" order on a project awhile back, and I have cried a little on the inside every day I have worked on it. My first introduction to flash was compiling SWFs in Linux using the MXMLC compiler. In fact, I even wrote the Actionscript 3 syntax highlighting rules for KDevelop (Kate) 3.5, because that's what I had available on my system to use. The flash platform is an AMAZING technology stack, and it is sad to see it go to waste behind a wall of patents wielded by a bafoon of a company.