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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, 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 that's especially true if it's a) not proprietary, b) not coming from Adobe, c) not outdated (flashplugin-installer adobe-flashplugin etc.), and d) converts Flash content into HTML5 et al.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).