Really excited about this, and so happy we were able to roll it out before Flash's official deprecation at the end of the year. If you have old SWFs you'd like to share, these are the directions for uploading them so that they'll be emulated in-browser: https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/datahub/Uploading_SWFs_for...
So this is real emulation, not just transcription into a video format? The vectorized and infinitely-scalable aspect of Flash is preserved? That's awesome.
Congrats! Flash games and videos were a huge part of my childhood. It's heartwarming to see people dedicated to preserve such a treasure trove of the older internet.
GemCraft, Desktop Tower Defense, RoboKill, Line Rider, Crush the Castle, Kingdom Rush, Realm of the Mad God ... all classics, all significant, all worth preserving.
Trying valiantly like many to replace my current affairs media diet with something more substantive, and Internet Archive has proven invaluable. Currently enjoying a first edition pdf scan of an E M Forester novel from 1920s. And it's transporting to dive into the yellowed pages, modernist fonts, and random errata. Thanks for all your important work ;)
The ultimate source would be if you could figure out how to archive the sites that TheFWA used to link to. That was the pinnacle of cutting edge Flash work.
As a sidenote, I’ve taken some brief dives into Ruffle and it looks very good. There’s great attention to detail everywhere. I hope it has a long future.
I’ve previously also taken brief dives into Lightspark and even submitted a minor PR or two. Lightspark is cool, but I feel Ruffle is already surpassing it in regards.
Huh, interesting you don’t know that one. Memes had a bigger impact then: there were fewer of them, they were more unexpected (because they were newer), and in fact the word meme either did not exist or, if it did, it was certainly not in widespread use.
Anyway:
“ On June 1, 2006, YouTube was taken down temporarily for maintenance. The phrase "ALL YOUR VIDEO ARE BELONG TO US" appeared below the YouTube logo as a placeholder while the site was down. Some users believed the site had been hacked, leading YouTube to add the message ‘ "No, we haven't be [sic] hacked. Get a sense of humor.”’
I can’t imagine YouTube doing anything like that today for a meme?
Merriam-Webster has a 1998 [0] reference that sounds close to the modern usage, though I don't know when got popular - at or before 2008 though, based on their next example. I do vaguely remember "viral video" and "image macro" were distinct in the early/mid-00s though, at the time I don't think they were grouped together under "meme".
Ah the dancing baby meme. That was huge and you could buy a software “package” on windows that had hundreds of video variations of the baby. I still have that software (no, I did not buy it).
That's because it was probably just one guy who had the authority to put that there without any threat of getting fired. Google today would set up a committee with diverse groups represented (including HR, PR and Legal) to focus test any and all potential "hate joke incidents" to ensure bland and inoffensiveness to all. The ongoing YouRube Rewind fiasco demonstrates this very well.
I have to thank the Japanese for having a sense of humor otherwise "all your base" would have died a slow and painful death long ago at the hands of the joke police, and it still might if it were to ever leave its relative obscurity.
> The ongoing YouRube Rewind fiasco demonstrates this very well.
Do you have a link for this? I’d like to read more about it. Searching for YT Rewind gave me the Wikipedia article and some scrubbed articles that don’t include stuff a out a fiasco.
Julia Alexander of The Verge suggested that YouTube had intentionally left out the biggest moments on the platform in 2018 from the video in an attempt to calm concerned advertisers over controversies that had plagued the platform over the past 2 years, saying "it's increasingly apparent, however, that YouTube is trying to sell a culture that's different from the one millions of people come to the platform for, and that's getting harder for both creators and fans to swallow".
And as it's drawn with vector graphics (I guess?) it can be sharper than most of the videos of that that you can find today (or was it fixed? I don't remember -- at least it looked so sharp then!). Anyway, the following video on youtube is approximately the content of the 600 KB swf, but, of course, with unchangeable and limited pixel rendering -- and around 50 MB in highest resolution.
There, having 100 KB more, one can also click to see the "deleted scene", play a small "game" or read the hate mail. And it does render across my full screen.
Edit 2: Tried ruffle. It can play that swf. Ruffle good. (But it seems that the lines are thicker and that the connections don't look the same)
Yeah, Flash was fundamentally a vector format for much of its life. It started adding bitmaps after a while, I wanna say in the Flash 5 era? It's been a long time and I've deliberately put a lot of my time with Flash in the mental vault, as it was also mostly time working under John K.
Anyway. I spent a lot of time hand-optimizing autotraces of scans of ink drawings, and even more time moving them around in sync to dialogue. Flash was very much about sending compact vector representations over your 28.8kbaud modem connection and moving them around instead of sending anything like what we would call a video stream, until they added the FLV format and YouTube happened.
Thanks. I knew about Flash in general, I just haven't checked yes if the 600 KB swf looked good full screen -- yes it does, with real Flash player. With Ruffle, the lines are thicker.
I still don't know, how are we going to be able to watch the old content with the native Flash player, at least on our desktops? Depending on the new emulations can result in missing or differently presented content (like these thicker lines?).
Would love to see the Larry Carlson flash animations make it onto here. I was able to track down the page where they used to live on the wayback machine [0] (some other pages under that domain would also have had some flash animations, too), but don't know how to grab the actual SWFs, if it's even possible any more.
What I don't understand is why google is intentionally excluding .swf results from search results. Okay, fine, you don't want it in Chrome that's your choice. But not indexing .swf in your search engine product because you don't support it in your browser product is crazy. It's going out of their way, doing more work, to hurt people.
I guess this is just another example of being unable to count on profit motivated corporations. It's a good thing the IA is trying to help.
They are not supported in most browsers. Most users are going to have a bad experience if they load a page with Flash, and it makes sense to down-rank pages that will deliver a bad experience.
Most file types are not supported in browsers. Only a few are. A "download file" dialog is not a bad experience. Treating .swf like a normal file type would both be easier and better in all ways.
Flash will not be supported in any of the large browsers after December, limiting access to people who go out of their way to use both a fork that preserves NPAPI or whatever Chromium uses and manually install some version of Flash.
I'm not aware of any search engines that index arbitrary files that the browser or some ubiquitous media viewer can't open. The most annoying I can think of is the occasional powerpoint files I've run across on google, and at least those are usually cached in a browser-friendly format.
It'd be like indexing Adobe CS project files, and requiring a subscription to Adobe to open the search result.
There is a binary, Windows-native SWF player that still works 100% perfectly on Win 10. There is also one for OSX but with Apple's hatred for backwards compatibility I have no idea whether it still works or not
It's a shame that Adobe has all but buried it, but it does work.
Honestly its the only good way to view downloaded flash content nowadays, because it preserves all the hyperlinks and other nonlinearity that is lost on conversion to a video file. Strongbad emails, for example, have tons of hidden content activated by clicking hotspots during playback. (You can even hunt for them by hitting Tab)
And does Google index/show any of them in a search result? You usually have to get them indirectly from pages, but the search links themselves never directly link to any unsupported file type AFAIK
Yes, Adobe released an SDK (which Google used) to allow indexing content in SWF files. However, it looks like Google no longer uses it, or indexes them.
All major browsers have sunset support for Flash and it's moved behind increasingly strict warnings over the years. Since Google Search is a web application, there's not much value in giving people content they can't use.
In fact, Google used to index Flash files and marked the corresponding search results with "[swf]", similar to how they do with PDF files now. I don't recall at what point in time they stopped doing that.
Newgrounds is also doing a good job of making many of even their interactive Flash animations compatible with modern browsers, which is great! I hope they'll be able to extend this to the games too
There's an enormous cache of historic SWFs hosted here [1] and it would be awesome if the Internet Archive could archive them, so they won't get lost. However, there are far too many to individually add.
My personal favorites would be the Demented Cartoon Movie [2], Weebl and Bob's transdimensional portal [3] (which is located under the stairs) and of course The End of the World [4]. They all load perfectly in Ruffle [5].
I still joke about TDCM with some of my friends, but sometimes I wonder about Brian Kendall. Imagine if the most impactful artwork of your career was a dumb flash movie you made when you were a kid?
The archive only has a single animutation too, which is a bit sad. Some of them are uploaded to youtube, but that loses any hidden interactivity that some of them had. Hopefully someone can find the original SWFs and upload them.
Currently recursively downloading from [1]. Afterwards I’ll start testing and uploading them.
Edit: Most of the SWF files are showing a black screen on the demo website, even though I do not have time to individually debug all files, I might be able to automate the testing part
I just remembered that I have tons of SWFs on my hard-drive too. If someone else has a data-dump, do share!
Seriously, I always wondered why this wasn't done. Yes, some of the more OS-related stuff may not be possible to emulate, but 99% of use cases probably don't use those. I never understood why Adobe themselves didn't make an emulation layer themselves. Once again the community saves the day, but I still feel it would've been a lot easier for them to do it.
Hopefully some collaboration can be made between swfchan and the IA. swfchan claims to have 217753 flashes: http://swfchan.com/
(Edit: NSFW. Would recommend an adblocker before opening, at least.)
It archives flashes (and their threads!) from /f/ and others. A great historical resource.
The presentation of swfchan may not be for everyone, but it does hold an immense amount of data.
While mini retro consoles are still all the rage, a retro console that has a flash emulator, with a keyboard, mouse, and a vast database of classic SWFs, would be awesome.
I would have been disappointed if their examples didn't include BadgerBadger. And they even have the original version! You can tell because if you let it loop for about 5 minutes the audio and video no longer match.
Kids today won't know the pain of not being able to see 50 small stick figures trying to pummel each other at >15fps.
Also Flash was one of the best dev environments in history, in my opinion. More precisely, one of the most accessible, which most dev environments lack.
The museum-docent write-ups for the featured SWFs are the perfect icing on this archival cake. I never knew there was a debate over the species of onion in Leekspin!
A side note, and perhaps this is down to Safari's imperfect WASM support, but I'm not getting any sound in Safari.
Programming a shitty AS2 "catch the falling object" game with the cheesiest story and uploading it to Newgrounds got me into programming. Might never have if not for Flash.
same here. i got into AS2 in highschool and built many flash games. some people still play them and our sad it won't be playable on chrome by end of the year
There is none in a single package. The closest is Godot but it's not really for animation purposes. Flash went really far. At some point one could even write 2D shaders and use C++ code with 'Alchemy'. A lot of interesting tech abandoned...
I mean Javascript can certainly do all that but it's code first, not "IDE" first.
AS3 and VKontakte apps and games for me. Not really got me into programming, I did some J2ME before, but Flash certainly did end up shaping my life quite a lot. It's honestly a shame there's no technology currently in existence that would allow this kind of creativity, with a barrier to entry as low as Flash had.
Flash: you open the page, it plays. There might be one additional click required depending on your browser settings.
This: you open the page but it needs to be downloaded. You download it. You unzip it. You see that it's a Windows executable but you're on a Mac. You open it hoping that wine will run it. It does. You choose your graphics settings. You click OK. It plays.
Though I'm aware that Unity is capable of running on the web, I haven't seen that capability used much.
Same here. Flash helped me understand OOP. I would have never become a programmer without Flash the IDE.
It is very sad what Adobe did with Flash (and Fireworks, and Dreamweaver...), especially in the wake of WASM where they could have ported most of the platform. I guess there was no financial incentives to do that.
I wouldn't say Lightspark has failed at all, they're progressing nicely. Others are too.
I heard a rumor Shumway was abandoned as a project by Mozilla because ex-Adobe engineers were steering the project and Adobe issued concerns; they probably could have been worked out, but you know, Mozilla. Since then, Flash has been end of life'd more aggressively, so I think Shumway could return.
Flash files should be like music or graphic files - playable in a variety of players and items. Even VLC someday, we could hope.
A Flash player is a lot more like a Java virtual machine + libraries or a Web browser than it is like a video codec.
I have not heard that rumor about Shumway. As a former Mozilla distinguished engineer, I think I would have.
Thanks for pointing out Lightspark is progressing. I thought it had stalled, but I was wrong. Still, if Lightspark is doing well it's not ideal to split efforts into multiple projects.
I’m a program manager at Mozilla and I helped manage the Shumway project for a year or so. A couple jobs before Mozilla, I was an engineer on the Flash Player team at Macromedia and then Adobe. Since I was not writing Shumway code or guiding the team’s implementation decisions, Mozilla’s lawyers did not feel there was a conflict. If Adobe really wanted to shut down Shumway (or Ruffle or Lightspark), they could cite numerous obscure Flash patents regardless of who’s working on the project.
Mozilla stopped working on Shumway primarily because:
1. Flash compatibility was going to be a lot of work and full compatibility was impossible (e.g. matching Flash bugs, closed-source codecs, system APIs not available to JavaScript)
2. Content creators were already moving on from Flash. They were slowly heeding the “Flash is a dead end” messaging from browser makers and Adobe itself.
So Mozilla saw multiple engineer-years of work ahead to support a proprietary technology that was shrinking and decided the Shumway engineers’ time would be better spent on other Mozilla projects. Even if Firefox bundled a Shumway with great Flash compatibility, content creators would choose a technology that is going to work in Chrome and IE.
Fun fact: before working on Shumway, one of the engineers built another JavaScript Flash Player called Gordon. The Shumway name is thus derived:
Flash -> “Flash Gordon” -> Gordon -> “Gordon Shumway” (the alien ALF’s real name) -> Shumway :)
Hi, original author of Lightspark here. There is certainly value in OSS implementations of Flash, but the reality is that reaching accurate support for all the SWFs out there is a titanic effort. The sheer size of the runtime library of ActionScript 3 makes it a massive project, and on top of that the documentation/specification is most often vague or missing altogether.
Lightspark is something I started 10 years ago, back in my University years. Nowadays, I am working on the problem of Flash preservation and life extension from the perspective of compilers and virtual machines at Leaning Technologies. If you want to read more about our approach:
I'm glad to see The Internet Archive doing this. There's a flash animation I used to enjoy back around 2000 and I have been looking for it for almost as long. It was basically a showcase animation sequence done by what I think was a Japanese designer. I don't remember the full sequence but it was an anime style animation and at the end was a girl standing on a cliff with her hair blowing in the wind.
I'm really hoping it will end up on The Internet Archive. I sure would like to see it again. It was very beautiful.
I've tried but haven't had any luck. I think my memory of the animation just isn't enough to be able to provide enough detail other than a girl standing on a cliff with the wind blowing her hair. I feel like flower pedals were blowing around too but at this point it's been 15-20 years since I've seen it so who knows what is accurate about that memory?
That is the one that I still remembered so vividly that this post motivated me to download a Flash player and look through my folder of SWF files for the first time in probably at least 15 years.
I’m surprised that so few people in these comments seem aware of Flashpoint, and that the linked article only mentions Flashpoint briefly at the end.
I expect Flashpoint to always have a bigger archive of SWFs than the Internet Archive. This is because the Internet Archive seems to be aiming to only host SWFs that can be compiled for web using Ruffle, while Flashpoint accepts any SWF that can be played by the official Flash Player. Flashpoint can do that because it targets users who are willing to install its archive-browsing software for Windows, which includes a version of Flash Player.
Yeah, Adobe's failure to keep Flash relevant is the problem. Not Steve Jobs. It's not like they didn't try to work with Adobe.
Adobe just couldn't get it done.
This is what disruption is like. It's great that we have orgs like IA doing the work to keep this old content alive and accessible, and a platform like the Web that can grow and adapt over time.
Something like that doesn't necessarily need to be a deal breaker. Part of Doom 3 was patent encumbered, but Id released the rest of the engine with that bit removed. Releasing part of the software in a nonfunctional state is much better than nothing.
True, but that would have been quite a leap for Adobe to make.
There is also the possibility that the licensed code would have been trivial to work around, which ironically would have created more liability for Adobe due to the mind-boggling stupidity that is "software patents" (in theory, software patents claim a specific implementation, but then in practice are often used to shake down anyone who makes a different implementation of the same idea, and the simpler the idea behind the patent, the worse the problem gets, unless you can find prior art to invalidate the patent claims). All of which would have put Adobe in a tough position, since they are fairly pro software patents.
While everyone loves Flash games and Homestar Runner and everything, let's not forget that Apple's war was against horrendous Flash websites, which were never going to be reasonably accessible on a touchscreen phone.
> which were never going to be reasonably accessible on a touchscreen phone.
I mean you could say the exact same thing for most websites that weren't fit for mobile and touch screen either. It had nothing to do with Flash, it was 100% a developer's problem, not a tech problem.
Flash problems are: proprietary/closed source VM, performances and security, which was all on Adobe side, not Flash developers.
So Steve Jobs was wrong initially. Let us remember that Jobs didn't want native apps on IOS, he wanted people to write web apps and Native apps to be solely the prerogative on Apple, until he changed his mind. Now you be that Apple prefers developers to write native apps, since it makes Apple a substantial amount of money.
Yes and back then everybody invoked "web standards". Well look at "web standards" now. Apple isn't at the forefront of implementing them anymore, they love their "native apps" and the billions they are making virtually for free with their store...
Haxe lives and does compile for IOS on though, the irony (or the power of open source).
Back in the day http://eye4u.com had by far the most amazing flash animations of any site I'd seen. I don't know how they did it but their animations were next level for that time period.
This is the site that got me into designing flash. I was so entertained and thought every website should have an intro like that. Build one for our website, not anywhere as close to professional, and realized how annoying it was to wait for that animation every time I loaded the site.
264 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 258 ms ] threadSource: https://twitter.com/fwa/status/1327665766213316608
I managed to grab a local copy. Let me know if you want it.
Trying valiantly like many to replace my current affairs media diet with something more substantive, and Internet Archive has proven invaluable. Currently enjoying a first edition pdf scan of an E M Forester novel from 1920s. And it's transporting to dive into the yellowed pages, modernist fonts, and random errata. Thanks for all your important work ;)
[0]https://ruffle.rs/
I’ve previously also taken brief dives into Lightspark and even submitted a minor PR or two. Lightspark is cool, but I feel Ruffle is already surpassing it in regards.
https://archive.org/details/flash_allyourbase
Anyway:
“ On June 1, 2006, YouTube was taken down temporarily for maintenance. The phrase "ALL YOUR VIDEO ARE BELONG TO US" appeared below the YouTube logo as a placeholder while the site was down. Some users believed the site had been hacked, leading YouTube to add the message ‘ "No, we haven't be [sic] hacked. Get a sense of humor.”’
I can’t imagine YouTube doing anything like that today for a meme?
The word meme was coined by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene, in 1976. The internet got the term from the book.
[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/meme-word-orig...
I have to thank the Japanese for having a sense of humor otherwise "all your base" would have died a slow and painful death long ago at the hands of the joke police, and it still might if it were to ever leave its relative obscurity.
Do you have a link for this? I’d like to read more about it. Searching for YT Rewind gave me the Wikipedia article and some scrubbed articles that don’t include stuff a out a fiasco.
Julia Alexander of The Verge suggested that YouTube had intentionally left out the biggest moments on the platform in 2018 from the video in an attempt to calm concerned advertisers over controversies that had plagued the platform over the past 2 years, saying "it's increasingly apparent, however, that YouTube is trying to sell a culture that's different from the one millions of people come to the platform for, and that's getting harder for both creators and fans to swallow".
https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/19369
It's not on archive.org yet as far as I can tell.
Really crazy how little data went into stuff like that.
http://www.fastswf.com/jDwfXOc
And as it's drawn with vector graphics (I guess?) it can be sharper than most of the videos of that that you can find today (or was it fixed? I don't remember -- at least it looked so sharp then!). Anyway, the following video on youtube is approximately the content of the 600 KB swf, but, of course, with unchangeable and limited pixel rendering -- and around 50 MB in highest resolution.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeKX2bNP7QM
Edit: Just found -- the special edition captured in the above video is ~ 700 KB swf (719,527 bytes):
http://gpatricka.net/assets/napsterbad.swf
There, having 100 KB more, one can also click to see the "deleted scene", play a small "game" or read the hate mail. And it does render across my full screen.
Edit 2: Tried ruffle. It can play that swf. Ruffle good. (But it seems that the lines are thicker and that the connections don't look the same)
1) https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/WebAnimation/NapsterB...
Yeah, Flash was fundamentally a vector format for much of its life. It started adding bitmaps after a while, I wanna say in the Flash 5 era? It's been a long time and I've deliberately put a lot of my time with Flash in the mental vault, as it was also mostly time working under John K.
Anyway. I spent a lot of time hand-optimizing autotraces of scans of ink drawings, and even more time moving them around in sync to dialogue. Flash was very much about sending compact vector representations over your 28.8kbaud modem connection and moving them around instead of sending anything like what we would call a video stream, until they added the FLV format and YouTube happened.
I still don't know, how are we going to be able to watch the old content with the native Flash player, at least on our desktops? Depending on the new emulations can result in missing or differently presented content (like these thicker lines?).
[0]: http://web.archive.org/web/20190803102822/http://trippywonde...
I guess this is just another example of being unable to count on profit motivated corporations. It's a good thing the IA is trying to help.
I'm not aware of any search engines that index arbitrary files that the browser or some ubiquitous media viewer can't open. The most annoying I can think of is the occasional powerpoint files I've run across on google, and at least those are usually cached in a browser-friendly format.
It'd be like indexing Adobe CS project files, and requiring a subscription to Adobe to open the search result.
It's a shame that Adobe has all but buried it, but it does work.
Honestly its the only good way to view downloaded flash content nowadays, because it preserves all the hyperlinks and other nonlinearity that is lost on conversion to a video file. Strongbad emails, for example, have tons of hidden content activated by clicking hotspots during playback. (You can even hunt for them by hitting Tab)
And does Google index/show any of them in a search result? You usually have to get them indirectly from pages, but the search links themselves never directly link to any unsupported file type AFAIK
[Edit] A quick search reveals that Google stopped indexing SWF files fairly recently: https://searchengineland.com/google-to-stop-indexing-flash-c...
My personal favorites would be the Demented Cartoon Movie [2], Weebl and Bob's transdimensional portal [3] (which is located under the stairs) and of course The End of the World [4]. They all load perfectly in Ruffle [5].
[1] https://locker.phinugamma.org/swf/
[2] SWF: https://locker.phinugamma.org/swf/albinoblacksheep/demented%... | Video: https://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/demented
[3] http://www.venue.nu/infusions/the_kroax/uploads/movies/Weebl...
[4] SWF: https://locker.phinugamma.org/swf/albinoblacksheep/end%28www... | Video: https://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/end
[5] https://ruffle.rs/demo/
The archive only has a single animutation too, which is a bit sad. Some of them are uploaded to youtube, but that loses any hidden interactivity that some of them had. Hopefully someone can find the original SWFs and upload them.
No need to wonder; you can read his reflection on it here [1], although it's unclear when exactly it was written.
[1] http://briankendall.net/animation/tdcm.htm
Edit: Most of the SWF files are showing a black screen on the demo website, even though I do not have time to individually debug all files, I might be able to automate the testing part
I just remembered that I have tons of SWFs on my hard-drive too. If someone else has a data-dump, do share!
(https://archive.org/donate/ in case anyone else is feeling generous)
https://github.com/sponsors/Herschel
It archives flashes (and their threads!) from /f/ and others. A great historical resource.
The presentation of swfchan may not be for everyone, but it does hold an immense amount of data.
> A great historical resource.
I wouldn't say great. It's a virus nest.
Kids today won't know the pain of not being able to see 50 small stick figures trying to pummel each other at >15fps.
Also Flash was one of the best dev environments in history, in my opinion. More precisely, one of the most accessible, which most dev environments lack.
A side note, and perhaps this is down to Safari's imperfect WASM support, but I'm not getting any sound in Safari.
I mean Javascript can certainly do all that but it's code first, not "IDE" first.
It feels like there is a desire for the same hacky frontend yet no one wants to invest.
(Disclaimer: I built it)
It currently lacks sound, but a lot of young people seem to be having fun using it to create games, animations, stories, puzzles, etc.
This: you open the page but it needs to be downloaded. You download it. You unzip it. You see that it's a Windows executable but you're on a Mac. You open it hoping that wine will run it. It does. You choose your graphics settings. You click OK. It plays.
Though I'm aware that Unity is capable of running on the web, I haven't seen that capability used much.
It is very sad what Adobe did with Flash (and Fireworks, and Dreamweaver...), especially in the wake of WASM where they could have ported most of the platform. I guess there was no financial incentives to do that.
https://archive.org/details/endoftheworld_flash
Flash gave creators so much more latitude than YouTube and whatever it is that Steve Jobs wanted for us. We've really lost something.
Facebook, Platforms, ... we had so much more free-form creativity back in the golden era of the web. It's a shame.
Flash, despite not being open source, was really amazing and nothing has filled its place.
I heard a rumor Shumway was abandoned as a project by Mozilla because ex-Adobe engineers were steering the project and Adobe issued concerns; they probably could have been worked out, but you know, Mozilla. Since then, Flash has been end of life'd more aggressively, so I think Shumway could return.
Flash files should be like music or graphic files - playable in a variety of players and items. Even VLC someday, we could hope.
I have not heard that rumor about Shumway. As a former Mozilla distinguished engineer, I think I would have.
Thanks for pointing out Lightspark is progressing. I thought it had stalled, but I was wrong. Still, if Lightspark is doing well it's not ideal to split efforts into multiple projects.
But what I said is still true in terms of implementation effort.
Mozilla stopped working on Shumway primarily because:
1. Flash compatibility was going to be a lot of work and full compatibility was impossible (e.g. matching Flash bugs, closed-source codecs, system APIs not available to JavaScript)
2. Content creators were already moving on from Flash. They were slowly heeding the “Flash is a dead end” messaging from browser makers and Adobe itself.
So Mozilla saw multiple engineer-years of work ahead to support a proprietary technology that was shrinking and decided the Shumway engineers’ time would be better spent on other Mozilla projects. Even if Firefox bundled a Shumway with great Flash compatibility, content creators would choose a technology that is going to work in Chrome and IE.
Fun fact: before working on Shumway, one of the engineers built another JavaScript Flash Player called Gordon. The Shumway name is thus derived:
Flash -> “Flash Gordon” -> Gordon -> “Gordon Shumway” (the alien ALF’s real name) -> Shumway :)
Lightspark is something I started 10 years ago, back in my University years. Nowadays, I am working on the problem of Flash preservation and life extension from the perspective of compilers and virtual machines at Leaning Technologies. If you want to read more about our approach:
https://medium.com/leaningtech/preserving-flash-content-with...
https://medium.com/leaningtech/running-flash-in-webassembly-...
https://medium.com/leaningtech/announcing-cheerpx-for-flash-...
There's also the excellent Gnash program for playing swf files :)
I'm really hoping it will end up on The Internet Archive. I sure would like to see it again. It was very beautiful.
That is the one that I still remembered so vividly that this post motivated me to download a Flash player and look through my folder of SWF files for the first time in probably at least 15 years.
I’m surprised that so few people in these comments seem aware of Flashpoint, and that the linked article only mentions Flashpoint briefly at the end.
I expect Flashpoint to always have a bigger archive of SWFs than the Internet Archive. This is because the Internet Archive seems to be aiming to only host SWFs that can be compiled for web using Ruffle, while Flashpoint accepts any SWF that can be played by the official Flash Player. Flashpoint can do that because it targets users who are willing to install its archive-browsing software for Windows, which includes a version of Flash Player.
Adobe just couldn't get it done.
This is what disruption is like. It's great that we have orgs like IA doing the work to keep this old content alive and accessible, and a platform like the Web that can grow and adapt over time.
They should have fully open sourced it, at least the runtime.
> They should have fully open sourced it, at least the runtime.
Rumor had it that there was code in there that Adobe (or more likely, FutureSplash) had licensed and couldn't release.
There is also the possibility that the licensed code would have been trivial to work around, which ironically would have created more liability for Adobe due to the mind-boggling stupidity that is "software patents" (in theory, software patents claim a specific implementation, but then in practice are often used to shake down anyone who makes a different implementation of the same idea, and the simpler the idea behind the patent, the worse the problem gets, unless you can find prior art to invalidate the patent claims). All of which would have put Adobe in a tough position, since they are fairly pro software patents.
I mean you could say the exact same thing for most websites that weren't fit for mobile and touch screen either. It had nothing to do with Flash, it was 100% a developer's problem, not a tech problem.
Flash problems are: proprietary/closed source VM, performances and security, which was all on Adobe side, not Flash developers.
In fact, Flash apps did run on Mobile including IOS via Air. https://www.adobe.com/products/air.html
So Steve Jobs was wrong initially. Let us remember that Jobs didn't want native apps on IOS, he wanted people to write web apps and Native apps to be solely the prerogative on Apple, until he changed his mind. Now you be that Apple prefers developers to write native apps, since it makes Apple a substantial amount of money.
Haxe lives and does compile for IOS on though, the irony (or the power of open source).
https://haxe.org/
Apparently some of them are on youtube now:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aT4wt0fmGU
https://web.archive.org/web/20041126020223/http://eye4u.com/