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.
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
The performance/UX thing always got me too, and I remember creating Flash content on a 500mhz P3 on XP which ran smoother than some sites these days on a mid-2014 quad-core rMBP. It still feels like we should have made more progress in terms of things /feeling/ faster over the past 10+ years than we have.
Somewhat OT, but if you've ever watched medical office secretaries, airline desk people, bank tellers, or some hotel clerks work, you'd never think of switching them to a newer computer and web-apps; their proprietary terminal stuff works nearly instantly for most things they need to do. It's sad that the best web experiences today can still be an order of magnitude slower than that.
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.
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.
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.
Would make more sense for adobe to allow exporting flash projects in webtechs directly(without hacks like today's export feature).Because Shumway isnt going to run FLV videos or do sound synthesis.
> I still like Flash.
Me too.Though I moved to js,processing and openframework for multimedia projects.Flash IDE is still one of the best tool to learn programming.I would have hated learning programming through javascript frankly.
> Adobe's stupefying negligence and apathy for the platform
Yeah,that's insane.They had a huge community and they just blew it. Again,as I said earlier the whole emscripten toolchain + WebGL could still make Flash IDE relevant in the future,but I doubt Adobe wants to throw more money at it.They fired most of the flash team and outsourced the rest to India.
I see very little point in Shumway.It will run most swf so slow it wont be really usable in a professional context.
Start from scratch.Use WebGL and emscriptem.Write a flash like IDE that uses C++ or a safe language that compiles with the LLVM toolchain.Make flash without flash,backed by webtechs instead writing an emulator or that's just cargo culting.
ActionScript compiled to JS is not the performance bottleneck. In many cases it is faster than ActionScript ever was simply because of the huge investment most browser vendors have put into their JS engines. Flash-like vector graphics is what's hard to emulate on the web today. If you only care about moving spites around, then Flash, Shumway and C++/OpenGL will be mostly GPU bound.
Flash got a lot of things right, both the SWF file format and the authoring tools are pretty good. There's not much sense in re-inventing it (we could do without ActionScript though).
However, I find projects like this relevant as a way to enable sites that do utilize Flash, fallback gracefully to devices that do not have Flash support, even if it's at the cost of performance.
Oh yeah, totally. I also want a good open source Flash player so that some day, when Adobe finally pulls the plug, all of the stupid .swfs I've saved over the years will remain viewable. I'm just saying that it hasn't been a pressing issue for the "year of the Linux desktop" crowd for a while now.
> Probably because Flash isn't as relevant as it used to be.
That's not the angle I was going for actually. If Flash isn't as relevant now, why start a new implementation at all? Is someone wants to do it for fun, then sure. But it isn't even an interesting research project. Lightspark came the closest with actual GPU acceleration. Porting to JS is just a blind port.
It makes me not trust this as a viable future implementation, if none of the previous ports came even close to relevant.
you can get your tv shows and online movies. You could even before the internet. If you mean, when you can get them without flash then you can do that too. Netflix, Hulu, and iTunes all work on iOS without flash.
iTunes just feels bloated on Windows and doesn't exist for GNU/Linux.
iOS devices cost insane prices outside contract for a smartphone. As I am not willing to pay more than 300€, even if that isn't a problem to me. As many fellow Europeans I don't do contracts.
As a developer, iOS is a more closed system than Android and Windows Phone are. Specially how information gets in and out of the device without gatekeeper software like iTunes.
I don't intend to pay for an Apple system just to develop for iOS, given that I work with UNIX/Windows systems so I already have enough hardware at home.
Finally, on my home country, iOS devices are third place given their cost vs the average income.
In the case of Shumway, building everything on top of the web stack made it impossible to resume much of the previous work. It also turns out that if you want to build a Flash replacement, you have to reverse engineer 15 years of development on a poorly documented closed source system. If you're not bug for bug compatible you won't have a working Flash player, which is probably what stumbled a lot of projects in the past.
Have JS APIs implemented by browsers developed enough so that Flash's feature set is now possible to mock? I know in the past it would've been a real challenge to imitate the Flash Microphone and Camera APIs, and Flash had a real advantage in other areas like Clipboard APIs.
I haven't worked with AS3 for the past few years so my memory of the APIs is fading, but overall, they were for the most part well-structured and programmer-friendly. A complete Shumway would be really neat.
For the most part, yes. Some things are hard to emulate, Weak References, E4X which is still wildly used, AS3 Namespaces, and all the graphics APIs. Flash just has a very different rendering model that doesn't easily map to Canvas.
The hardest part about Flash is understanding how timeline animations interact with AS code: events, object construction order, for all versions of Flash. Shumway supports all SWF versions and the the three programming languages that are supported by the Flash player: AS1, AS2 and AS3.
It's not just "advanced" things like camera access that browsers fail to replicate for the standard web platform. AFAIK no browser even correctly supports something as simple as non-"Normal" blending modes for SVG.
And I'm saying this as a fairly staunch flash hater.
A lot of these things we're supposed to be using to replace flash with HTML5 are simply not there reliably or sometimes even at all. SVG is a particularly glaring example of something which is woefully under-implemented.
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.
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.
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).
[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/2ikd21/prezi_is...