Firefox adds Shumway flash player written in HTML5

Shumway Flash Player , written in HTML5, today added to the Firefox codebase . Using Shumway, you can play flash files (in SWF format) without Adobe Flash Player, see demos . You do not even need to install the extension to view the demos, Shumway is loaded as a JS file.

This is very important news from a security point of view, because the Adobe Flash Player plugin (along with Java) is one of the main sources of vulnerabilities in the browser, and it would be nice to get rid of it.

Shumway is a kind of experiment, the developers wanted to check if flash animation can be effectively rendered exclusively using HTML5, without using native code. The project was developed by the community, and now has received support from Mozilla.

The SWF (Shockwave Flash) format is a proprietary format for flash animation, vector graphics, video and audio. Used in games, commercials, cartoons, videos, etc. Originally developed by FutureWave Software to create cartoons, the format was introduced with the FutureSplash Animator program in 1996. Then FutureWave Software was acquired by Macromedia, which in turn was acquired by Adobe. The authors of the Flash technology refused to switch to Adobe and quit Macromedia before the takeover.