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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: 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?