from the shumway-shumhow-adobe-is-going-down dept.
In November 2012 the Mozilla Foundation announced “Project Shumway”, an effort to create a “web-native runtime implementation of the SWF file format.”
Two-and-a-bit years, and a colossal number of Flash bugs later, Shumway has achieved an important milestone by appearing in a Firefox nightly, a step that suggests it's getting closer to inclusion in the browser.
Shumway's been available as a plugin for some time, and appears entirely capable of handling the SWF files.
Few average users know of Shumway's existence, never mind seek it out. So the inclusion of the software in Firefox's nightlies will give it greater exposure. For now the code can only play certain videos hosted on Amazon.com, but developers intend to expand the list of sites from which Shumway will play SWF files.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 19 2015, @05:35AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 19 2015, @06:46AM
I'll assume you're trying for cute|witty and aren't simply uninformed.
For those who don't recognize the term:
Some software development projects have a new pre-release version at the end of each work day and they make that available to whomever wants to give it a try.
You can get bleeding-edge features with a "nightly", but expect breakage and/or incompleteness.
Shumway is an effort to make the Adobe Flash Media Player obsolete.
It is in a category with Gnash, Lightspark, and PepperFlash.
-- gewg_
(Score: 5, Interesting) by quadrox on Thursday February 19 2015, @08:28AM
Well, isn't it just replacing the official flash plugin with a different flash plugin? What's the point of that, especially now that flash is being abandonded in more and more places?
Ok, so apparently it doesn't use native code, which is an improvement security wise, but a drawback performance wise.
(Score: 2) by nightsky30 on Thursday February 19 2015, @01:17PM
Security?
They HAVE to be better than Adobe...No?
(Score: 3, Funny) by Dunbal on Thursday February 19 2015, @01:35PM
They would have to try very hard in order to be worse.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Foobar Bazbot on Thursday February 19 2015, @05:48PM
They would have to try very hard in order to be worse.
And Firefox is clearly too busy degrading the UI to put that kind of effort into insecurity.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 19 2015, @12:23PM
Oh, nooo! How I'm gonna save the offline pr0n SWF games without the standalone Flash player?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Thursday February 19 2015, @12:29PM
Is Adobe paying this effort? Because, see, Adobe didn't make any money from the Player - having someone take the maintenance burden would be a boon for them: they'll continue to cash on the composer/designer or whatever they call the development edition of Flash.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 19 2015, @05:57AM
Shumway, a-ha, will save every one of us.
Shumway, a-ha, he's a miracle.
Shumway, a-ha, king of the impossible.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Marand on Thursday February 19 2015, @08:06AM
Shumway, a-ha, will save every one of us.
Shumway, a-ha, he's a miracle.
Shumway, a-ha, king of the impossible
That just doesn't have the same charm as the original. I guess we'll have to keep using Flash, damn it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 19 2015, @04:37PM
Wasn't Gordon Shumway the name that A.L.F. claimed? Can't remember if it was ever mentioned in the TV series but was definately in a few of the comics.
Almighty Bod I feel old!
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 19 2015, @06:12AM
Wasn't there a Flash-killer from the GNU Project that died as soon as the developers graduated? They went out into the real world and realized there's more money to be made from gay prostitution than software development? Bathroom-Stall-Man's OS-killer project is still limping along with a fresh generation of young naive idiots every few years, eh?
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 19 2015, @06:52AM
Hey, that's... unspeakable rude. What about the equality and participation of women in ITC?
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 19 2015, @07:03AM
Lesbian is such a sexist word. Why can there be gay women but not lesbian men? Where's the queer equality?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 19 2015, @06:18AM
Does this mean they will continue to waste resources re-implementing plugins ?
The very purpose of plugins is to afford functionality that may not be suitable if implemented inside the browser, which go above and beyond what a browser can give.
Is there going to be an easy way to block this shum-way (re-inventing the wheel) plugin, the entire purpose of whose existence is absolete before it even began ?
What would it give me that the Adobe Flash plugin cannot ?
How will bugs and security issues in it be resolved ? Does this mean I should avoid Firefox altogether ? Does this mean hourly updates to FF ?
No thanks. I will stick with Flash.
(Score: 1) by magamo on Thursday February 19 2015, @01:47PM
Shumway appears to work with all the available noscript/flashblock extensions already out there. My big personal issue with it, is that it still allows for no newer flash content than 11.2, just like the official Linux Adobe Flash player. Mostly interested in using it with VMWare's web client, which is foolishly written in ActionScript.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Jesus_666 on Thursday February 19 2015, @01:51PM
What would it give me that the Adobe Flash plugin cannot ?
Hopefully, video playback without pegging the CPU at 100% and lagging the entire machine during the first few seconds. There's still Flash-based video players everywhere and pretty much all of them require the computer's full attention during startup.
How will bugs and security issues in it be resolved ?
Probably the same way they handle bugs and security issues in other parts of Firefox: By releasing updates.
Does this mean I should avoid Firefox altogether ?
If you absolutely refuse to run software capable of playing back SWF, yes. Otherwise probably not. Besides, chances are that you can just disable Shumway in about:config.
Does this mean hourly updates to FF ?
Why would it? Are Flash runtimes generally known for being susceptible to zero-hour exploits that are then fixed within minutes? Is there something I'm not aware of? (Just because Adobe Flash Player gets updates every couple days doesn't mean that Shumway would need to. Adobe aren't exactly paragons of quality programming.)
No thanks. I will stick with Flash.
Then why did you ask whether you should avoid Firefox because of them implementing SWF?
I can actually see the reasoning behind Shumway: Many video players on the web are built on Flash and Adobe's Flash runtime is terrible. Despite Adobe having spent years refining it it's still a slow, unstable mess. By making websites use Mozilla's runtime instead of Adobe's they have a chance of mitigating the aggravation caused by the plugin and their implementation can be smaller and simpler if they skip those parts not commonly used for video playback. A whitelist ensures that websites that need capabilities beyond what Shumway can offer don't use it.
This is not like their UI overhauls where they decided to abandon everything in favor of becoming faux-Chrome. I can see definite room for improvement in the Flash-as-a-video-player area and I doubt that Adobe can deliver.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by morgauxo on Thursday February 19 2015, @03:10PM
Flash is not available for every platform.
Flash is full of security holes.
Many of us really badly wan't to see Flash die a horrible death.
That is why Shumway is not a waste of resources.
Sorry everyone.. I know.. I just fed the troll.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Thursday February 19 2015, @06:33AM
Gnash. Almost worked. But seriously. Flash is so full of holes, but in terms of logic an security, that it should have died long ago. Die, flash, die! And may the new HTML standard incorporate no proprietary standards and DRM. OH, really? Well, F**j me.
(Score: 3, Funny) by LoRdTAW on Thursday February 19 2015, @02:45PM
I think, that you, have to learn, how to use. Punctuation, a bit more.
Or are you, William Shatner?
(Score: 5, Informative) by FatPhil on Thursday February 19 2015, @07:17AM
In order to kill something, you have to *not* support it, not *support* it.
> For now the code can only play certain videos hosted on Amazon.com
WTF? Did HTML5 never happen on planet Shamwhy? This is reinventing a wooden cart wheel in the pneumatic era. Probably the most stupid thing Firefox has done since the previous stupid thing they did. Fortunately, I never go anywhere near cutting edge stuff anyway, so hopefully this will be long-dead bloatware without me ever having to have come within a million megabytes of it.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 19 2015, @07:43AM
Shumway is a Flash-killer in the same way as Linux is a Unix-killer: it's a cheap inferior substitute but you can brag to your limp-dicked buddies about how you're totally sticking it to The Man.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by acharax on Thursday February 19 2015, @08:10AM
I came here to say that, stuff in this vein is a Flash-perpetuator moreso than it is a Flash-killer. Things tend to get worse if the purported "alternative" has not reached feature parity (that's 100 % coverage, nothing less) with what it tries to replace, it will only serve to drive more users toward what it sought to extinguish because they'll inevitably run into something that "doesn't work" and from there follow the directions given on the website (which'll point them to the tried and true Adoeb Flash plugin, which they will end up using for far more than that one website that didn't work).
It reminds me of how (almost) every website hosting PDF files still points visitors toward Adobe Reader despite there being a plethora of safer alternatives nowadays, including that "web-native" one that Mozilla shoehorned into their browser when Chrome did the same thing. What does "web-native" that mean anyway? Is that a marketing spin for slow/bloated "software" written in JavaScript?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 19 2015, @09:28AM
Now that with the next release of Firefox, Youtube will be switching to HTML5 video, there's no point to having Flash installed, so this is coming at the last possible moment to save Flash. People everywhere are preparing to finally get rid of that malware-infested, ad delivering piece of junk, and if not for this new project, Flash will be completely dead in a couple of months.
Adobe better be paying Mozilla more than Google ever did for this stunt.
(Score: 2) by nightsky30 on Thursday February 19 2015, @06:37PM
I see it more as they are relieving us of having to have buggy, security hole, Swiss cheese like, adobe software (No offense to Switzerland or their cheese) installed on our systems while the web starts to transition over to HTML 5. It improves security and keeps the web functional. Optimism.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by seandiggity on Thursday February 19 2015, @02:07PM
Although it's easy enough for tech-savvy users to extricate themselves from Flash (esp. on GNU/Linux, where there hasn't been official Adobe support for years), many users still rely upon Flash for displaying multimedia entertainment. In my personal experience, where I've migrated dozens of friends, family, and coworkers to GNU/Linux distros, any sane solution for displaying Flash that is built into the browser is welcome... that's especially true if it's a) not proprietary, b) not coming from Adobe, c) not outdated (flashplugin-installer adobe-flashplugin etc.), and d) converts Flash content into HTML5 et al.
Just a few weeks ago, I had to set up a GreaseMonkey script to load Flash content into an embedded VLC player in Firefox. Does anyone accuse VLC of "keeping Flash alive"? Surely, Shumway and Swiffy are better solutions, shims that may even hasten the demise of Flash (by moving users far away from Adobe's official plugin, and the proprietary browsers and OS's that support it).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 19 2015, @02:35PM
And remember that mozilla want to kill all plugins, so if several sites uses the "always security related nightmare and set to be out support next year" flash , mozilla reimplemented it in javascript and then can remove the plugins interface... or at least removes the need for one more plugin.
It is the same thing as pdfjs, it fixed the insecure acrobat reader pdf plugin by removing it usage by default
(Score: 2) by GeminiDomino on Thursday February 19 2015, @04:16PM
Are they going to replace the SWF extension with something that shortens down to ALF? (On ALF, the titular alien's 'real name' was 'Gordon Shumway')
Finagle, but I feel old now...
"We've been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of our culture"