
Firefox Roadmap for Flash End-Of-Life - nachtigall
https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2017/07/25/firefox-roadmap-flash-end-life/
======
scrollaway
No word on the last-I-heard-now-abandoned Shumway project. :(

Don't get me wrong I'm glad we can call flash dead but unless Adobe open
sources it, we need a project like shumway for archival purposes.

~~~
joosters
There's going to be a lot of content like flash games that will not be ported
to HTML. For these, wouldn't it make sense to run them in a locked-down VM,
using the last flash version, rather than re-implementing Flash from scratch?

~~~
demurgos
An interesting solution could be to work at the SWF level instead of the
Player level. Instead of rewriting, porting or locking down the Player, could
it be possible to automatically translate SWF files to another format?

I am fairly certain that there was some work about this but I'm not sure if
anything succeeded. Regarding the ActionScript part, a plausible solution
would be to target Haxe with the OpenFl library. OpenFl is a Haxe library
exposing the same API as Flash so you can use it to compile projects to the
targets supported by Haxe (JS, C++, ...). Some advanced AS code could be
tricky to translate, but using untyped sections and restricting it to JS it
could maybe be possible?

~~~
joosters
I remember hearing about some attempts to do this, I thought they had got
fairly advanced. A quick search brings up a project called Smokescreen, which
could play some flash. However, the project's website no longer exists.
There's a github project -
[https://github.com/cesmoak/smokescreen](https://github.com/cesmoak/smokescreen)
but the last commit was in 2011.

~~~
demurgos
Thanks for the link, it's definitely interesting. Unfortunately it seems that
most of the open source Flash projects died out around 2011-2012.

What I had in mind was more about converting the programs (SWF files) instead
of fixing the VM. I know that there were some open source VMs, but were there
some successful attempts at converting SWF files to a different format?

------
seanalltogether
There's still some pretty fun classic games on Kongregate that I like to go
back and play every 3-4 years. What options will we have after 2020?

~~~
mediumdeviation
The Flash authoring tool comes bundled with a standalone Flash movie player
that can open .swf files. It's available here, but I have no idea if this will
continue to work (the page warns against using this if you're not a
developer):
[https://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/debug_downloads.ht...](https://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/debug_downloads.html)

It's also possible to export any Flash movie as a standalone executable with
the Flash runtime baked in. This should be immune to any sort of deprecation.
Of course this relies on the developer who holds the original source file to
do the exporting.

~~~
bigbugbag
There's also a tool for converting flash to html5, but i'm not sure this would
work 100% for games.

------
jakozaur
Chrome made similar announcement yesterday:
[https://www.blog.google/products/chrome/saying-goodbye-
flash...](https://www.blog.google/products/chrome/saying-goodbye-flash-
chrome/)

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pvdebbe
I still prefer to watch youtube with its flash player. It handles my multi-
display setup better in linux, plus it releases the audio right after I finish
with the video. Not the end of the world though. I just have to start using a
secondary browser for youtube vids (that I want to view with audio on) and
tinker with my WM for getting a good fullscreen.

~~~
scrollaway
Tip: `mpv`, the video player, natively supports youtube videos (as well as
many other video streaming sites through the fabulous youtube-dl).

Watch videos using an awesome, _efficient_ video player with `mpv
[https://youtube.com/watch?v=...`](https://youtube.com/watch?v=...`). I
believe vlc offers the same feature.

~~~
StavrosK
Not only that, but there are very small extensions that place a button on your
toolbar that will launch MPV with the current URL. It's the only way I watch
YouTube nowadays, it always launches fullscreen on the second monitor and
quits when the video is done.

It's such a small change, but has a very large impact on the quality of my
video-watching experience, I couldn't believe it initially.

~~~
nathcd
I wonder whether youtube-dl (which is what mpv uses to get audio/video over
the web, I think) is going to get completely neutered by EME. Your setup is
similar to how I use Youtube lately, and the recent progression of EME has got
me worried that the setup won't be working for too much longer.

~~~
nitrogen
Is there any reason mpv couldn't stream encrypted video to the GPU? Or
implement its own EME wrapper and use the same blob the browser uses?

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skocznymroczny
Stupid question, wouldn't it be possible to compile current Flash player into
Javascript using Emscripten?

~~~
demurgos
Please correct me if I am wrong, but I believe that you need the source code
to compile a program using Emscripten? Even if some components of the Player
are open-sourced [1], the Player itself is still closed source.

[1]: [https://github.com/adobe/avmplus](https://github.com/adobe/avmplus)

~~~
earenndil
What if you decompiled the binary to c and __then__ compiled it with
emscripten?

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bigbugbag
There a lot a PR crap and marketing here, catering to adobe.

> Over the years, Flash has helped bring the Web to greatness with innovations
> in media and animation.

In reality, it was actually the opposite. Flash made the web lose a couple
late before much needed features emerged by occupying space with a proprietary
plugin which is among the top cause of security issues due to constant
vulnerabilities.

It's sad that mozilla would take such a stance and pretend flash made the web
great, or maybe they truly believe this which would explain a lot.

Thing is by 2020 it's possible firefox would have ceased to exist, when we see
the speed at which it become irrelevant and how mozilla pushes for this
outcome. Or maybe by 2020 firefox would have rebounded and turned around to
put the user first. We'll see.

~~~
jamesgeck0
> Flash made the web lose a couple late before much needed features emerged by
> occupying space with a proprietary plugin

Aren't HTML animation authoring tools are still catching up to what Flash had?
I don't know that it held the web back so much as it provided a bar to clear.

On a content level, Flash was definitely a boon. A lot of stuff like Homestar
Runner and Kongregate could not have existed with pure web technology at the
time.

There was a Hanselminutes podcast where it was mentioned that all the
hostility towards Flash before HTML animation was ready for prime time drove a
lot of animators away from the web completely, and that we're still recovering
from their departure.

~~~
bigbugbag
IIRC the timeline was something like this: macromedia bought flash from
another company and changed its name to flash and released it around 1997. At
the time it was merely capable of doing vector animations (no chance to spawn
kongregate out of it, if spawning kongregate can be considered a good thing or
not is another debate).

Work on an open standard for vector graphics and animation started in 1998
(svg and smil) and due to the nature of the process took time. By the time the
specification was mature in 2001 and 1999 flash had gone through a few major
versions and had just started including the first version of scripting (still
no kongregate possible at this point).

Flash got another major release introducing actionscript 2 in 2004 and after
being bought by adobe got its 9th major version with actionscript 3 in 2007
(and there we have kongregate). 4 years later support for the first version of
the open standard equivalent was still incomplete in browsers, 10 years after
the specification was mature. Could it be that it was not a priority for them
as there was flash filling this market ?

In the mean time flash had added support for video, of which the open standard
equivalent specification took a while then took another while before browsers
implemented it (once again, could it be related to fact that flash already
filled this market ?)

The other point to note is that flash from version 1 came with a GUI animation
editor with a slight learning curve, while the open standard required to code,
something most graphic designers do not care to learn. This also played a part
in flash popularity despite being proprietary, being a resource hog, a major
security issue and a serious privacy concern.

IMHO had flash not existed, the open standard would have been given a higher
priority and better authoring tools may have seen the light of the day.

So as we saw, kongregate could not have existed with flash either at the time,
and by the time kongregate launched, flash has had 10 years of existence and
the better half of dominating the market preventing the emergence of the web
technology that would have made a non-flash kongregate possible.

And as we see now in 2017, the closed and proprietary flash is once again on
the way out and with it about 20 years of web history are gonna disappear and
kongregate is now switching to pure web technology, though it could have been
done a few years back it only happened now that flash has been officially
deprecated on all platforms.

Nothing that we weren't repeatedly warned about for maybe 15 years now.

