

Mozilla Shumway: A Flash VM and runtime written in JavaScript - ot
https://github.com/mozilla/shumway

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riffraff
the prezi guys are actually looking for an engineer to work on shumway[1]

[1]
[http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2ikd21/prezi_is...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2ikd21/prezi_is_hiring_developers_to_work_on_mozilla/)

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darklajid
So, I cannot run Flash on my system. It breaks nine out of ten times,
gazillion reloads might lead to a single successful video playback and .. I
better not touch any controls (skip ads, jump acc. to the 'first third is
useless on YouTube' rule or anything).

I run Shumway from git and it works less reliably than flash so far. I love
the idea, but every thing I care about is black/doesn't work unless I right-
click and hit 'Fallback to Flash', which works as reliably as I stated in the
opening.

The case I'm trying to make is 1) it is desperately needed 2) it is far from
usable in general, based on mu personal experience

I keep it, follow git and try it more or less every day. I hope to remove the
crazy Adobe plugin one day.

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lbenes
From the symptoms you're describing, it sounds like you're using Flash with
Firefox on Linux. I had the same issue as you until I switched to Google
Chrome. Firefox is stuck at 11.2.202.425, while Chrome is using the latest
16.0.0.235

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darklajid
You are correct, but switching to Chrome is not an option for me. Good to know
that this would solve the problem, might be something I'd offer to my wife as
a potential workaround. Thanks!

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keeperofdakeys
Just for a little bit of background, chrome supports a newer api (pepper), and
get permission from adobe to package flash themselves. Firefox uses an older
api (NPAPI), and adobe are no longer packaging flash for linux in general. So
things will not improve, more things will not work in the future.

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darklajid
I'm not sure if this was targeted at me or the general public.

If the former: I was aware of that, but a ~random~ plugin is no reason for me
to jump to a different (and ultimately not interesting, from my personal view)
browser.

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viraptor
So there were promising projects before: gnash and lightspark. And even
another javascript converter - smokescreen. So why are they dying? It's hard
to believe that they all hit a brick wall / wrong path and have to be started
from scratch rather than continued.

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ANTSANTS
Probably because Flash isn't as relevant as it used to be. Years ago poor
Flash support was a dealbreaker for a lot of people that might have switched
to Linux, which provided a strong raison d'être for open source Flash
replacements. Nowadays, due to popular platforms like iOS with no Flash
support, few sites _rely_ on Flash for core functionality (though you still
have cases like video quality being better for Youtube on Firefox with Flash
because of the licensing issues with H264, most regular users won't notice
this). "Millennials" (or whatever the fuck people in their 20s now are
supposed to be called) that want to keep Homestar Runner alive are probably
the biggest group that cares about having an open source Flash runtime today.

I still like Flash. It helped a lot of kids (myself included) get into
computers, its authorship tools allowed non-programmers to create a lot of
really cool animations and interactive things over the years, and technically
it's _still_ ahead of HTML5 in a lot of ways (the gap is slowly shrinking due
to Adobe's stupefying negligence and apathy for the platform, but I still find
that most websites with even the slightest hint of superfluous animation lurch
and stutter embarrassingly today on my fairly decked-out PC compared to full-
blown Flash animations on my Pentium). If Adobe hadn't bought Macromedia, and
if their management had had the good sense to release the source to the Flash
player client, I think the web would be in a much better place right now.

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cwyers
Funny that you mention Homestar Runner -- I've recently introduced my daughter
to that site, and she loves it. And while I'm watching her play with it, I
marvel at how that kind of rich interactive experience (the sbemails with
clickable text Easter Eggs, for instance) was available back then, and it
seems like we've pretty much backslid from the functionality of a site like
that with HTML5 -- if it's available in HTML5 and Javascript, it's still
nowhere near as easy for nonprogrammers to author that kind of content without
Flash.

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woah
I'm interested in seeing some sort of solid documentation on the claims that
flash has wildly better performance than JS. It kind of matches my experience
with computers in the 90s and I'd really like to find out how much better it
is, and why.

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mbebenita
Flash has a retained mode graphics API and a fantastic scan-line rasterizer.
Each pixel is drawn once which is not the case for HTML Canvas where there is
usually a lot of overdraw.

It's all about graphics perf, not AS3 vs JS anymore.

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woah
Could one somehow implement something similar on top of canvas, saving the
renderer from doing all that extra work?

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denysonique
Firefox is my main browser and it is a bit sad to see this Mozilla project
barely working on Firefox as opposed to Chromium were it runs much smoother.

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soperj
Yeah, until this gets implemented, I'm still using Chrome for a lot of my
browsing needs on Fedora. Really see no need to get a flash player that
constantly goes out of date.

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soperj
Didn't mean to sound so negative. Love firefox, keep on doing what you're
doing guys. I should probably look into helping with this project if I can.

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mbebenita
Shumway dev here. There are a lot of fascinating aspects to Shumway, it's
basically a browser inside a browser and there are a million things to do, so
ping us on IRC if you'd like to get involved, #shumway (irc.mozilla.org).

