Flash on Firefox with Shumway instead of official plugin

[ekianjo]

http://gemal.dk/blog/2013/10/02/html5_flash_player_shumway_landed/

and demos here :

http://mozilla.github.io/shumway/

It's HTML5 based (through a separate runtime).

Not sure how well this would work on Pandora, performance wise. But that could be another way to bring Flash compatibility on Firefox. 

 

[Crionic]

I was hoping that HTML5 finally replaces Flash, but emulating it sounds like a step backwards.

 

[WizardStan]

Flash is an interpreted language, it's not emulation just because the virtual machine is written in Javascript instead of C++. Javascript has been performing surprisingly well recently, don't discount it until it has been given some fair tests.

 

[fusion_power]

I will mark the day in my calendar for celebration when we finaly do not need any Flash anymore in the Internets.

 

[ekianjo]

I will mark the day in my calendar for celebration when we finaly do not need any Flash anymore in the Internets.

You'll have to wait for a long, long time. Major seconds of the internet are still running with Flash, and ads is one of them.

 

[Zero3K]

I tried installing the extension, disabling the Flash plugins and viewing a stream on Twitch.tv. The extension isn't working since its telling me that I need Adobe Flash Player to view it. How do I get it to work or is it not possible at this time?

 

[WizardStan]

Try some flash games or something?

Remember, videos like youtube and twitch aren't exactly "flash", it's just using flash to control streaming content. They may have implemented input and vector graphics and animation but not gotten to the streaming part yet.

 

[ekianjo]

In the browser on desktop games were working fine for me.

 

[Zero3K]

Do you all still have the Flash plugin enabled? If so, then Shumway isn't being used (at least I think?)

 

[WizardStan]

I will say it is very hit or miss. Loading SWF files specifically sometimes worked, sometimes didn't. Meanwhile, seems like sites like Newgrounds are specifically looking to see if you have the flash plugin and won't even try to work if you don't, so that's something this extension definitely needs to address.

I also managed to get it to leak memory like a sieve. It filled up 8GB of physical RAM and proceeded to swap another 8GB before Firefox finally died. I'd have killed it manually but as soon as my system starts swapping it effectively becomes dead. I should really just turn swap off.

edit:

Do you all still have the Flash plugin enabled? If so, then Shumway isn't being used (at least I think?)

I don't have flash installed in Firefox at all on my desktop.

 

[Askarus]

Is it also available for other browsers?

I'd like to play flash games with Qupzilla in the background (less RAM needed).

 

[ekianjo]

Is it also available for other browsers?


I'd like to play flash games with Qupzilla in the background (less RAM needed).

its developed by mozilla so i guess target platform is firefox

 

[WizardStan]

Is it also available for other browsers?

Not as a plugin. As it is technically just a web page that takes an SWF as input, you could load it in any HTML5 compliant browser. You can play the demos in Chrome.

 

[Askarus]

"Shumway can not be installed because Firefox can not modify the needed files."

What am I doing wrong?

I follow the second link and download it.

 

[WizardStan]

Apparently it's been officially added to the Firefox nightly. By January it'll presumably be fully functional and released with update 27.

 

[ekianjo]

Apparently it's been officially added to the Firefox nightly. By January it'll presumably be fully functional and released with update 27.

Wow. That's a pretty big sign of commitment ! 

 

[Askarus]

Apparently it's been officially added to the Firefox nightly. By January it'll presumably be fully functional and released with update 27.

That's nice.

 

[_jr_]

Apparently it's been officially added to the Firefox nightly. By January it'll presumably be fully functional and released with update 27.

I'd be surprised if it runs more than a (smallish) couple of popular sites.


Unfortunately it doesn't run most of gnash's testsuite (it seems to be picky about the authoring tool used to create a movie) so I couldn't test compatibility more thoroughly (without more work), but while not bad it doesn't look that great from other test files. And that isn't something that can be easily fixed.


I also think that while the idea id good, the execution is flawed in that the neccessary fast JIT is only available on the platforms where adobe's flashplayer is also available (if I understand it correctly firefox JIT is the freed flashplayer JIT, but I may be wrong). On X86 code execution performance is comparable to gnash (which is a pure interpreter) which is signicantly slower than adobe's player, but still good. Rendering seems slower and memory consumption is unacceptable. I'm not sure whether these can be fixed at all given the architecture.


It will definitely be interesting to see further development.

 

[comradekingu]

Having adobe flashplayer available for your platform isnt good, its a security risk...

 

[Askarus]

I've tried Youtube video and Flash game.

Both failed.

(X86 PC)