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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: 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.