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HTML5 Flash Player (Shumway) lands in Mozilla

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Re: HTML5 Flash Player (Shumway) lands in Mozilla

#51

Post by Doctor_Fegg »

This is great. It effectively makes ActionScript 3 into YALTCTJS; Yet Another Language That Compiles To JavaScript, just like CoffeeScript and TypeScript.

In particular, AS3 is strongly typed; you could say it puts the Java into JavaScript. It has (had?) a large developer community, and there's a lot of good code for it out there already. I quite enjoy programming it, though the endless reliance on EventListeners is a PITA.

Mind you, Flex (the UI framework) genuinely does deserve to eat flaming death. I'm convinced Adobe were trolling Apache by donating it to them.

Re: HTML5 Flash Player (Shumway) lands in Mozilla

#52

Post by rorrr2 »

spongle wrote: post #25
Wintamute wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no real conceptual difference between a element, a element, a WebGL experience, a NaCl app or a Flash on your webpage. They're all somewhat non-semantic, hard to search, rich media black boxes. So what's your particular beef with Flash, especially when rendered via HTML5? Or do you just hate all tools that enable creativity beyond a plain text website equally? Or did you just drink the Flash-should-die KoolAi…

Yes there is. You misunderstand. My beef is with NaCl, objects, Applets and ActiveX etc as well, mainly because they run outside of the browser's engine, sandbox, security model and conceptual model. you also have to ship them externally to the browser. Canvas, video, webgl fine.

NaCl is sandboxed.

http://www.chromium.org/nativeclient/getting-started/getting...

Re: HTML5 Flash Player (Shumway) lands in Mozilla

#53

Post by Marazan »

Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #51

This is great. It effectively makes ActionScript 3 into YALTCTJS; Yet Another Language That Compiles To JavaScript, just like CoffeeScript and TypeScript. In particular, AS3 is strongly typed; you could say it puts the Java into JavaScript. It has (had?) a large developer community, and there's a lot of good code for it out there already. I quite enjoy programming it, though the endless reliance on EventListeners is…

While it has a number of poor implementation choices under the hood Flex was simply miles ahead of any competing tech for doing Rich Internet Applications 5 years ago.

It's still ahead even now, just not so decisively.

Re: HTML5 Flash Player (Shumway) lands in Mozilla

#54

Post by willvarfar »

This is excellent for security. In the same way that Mozilla's PDF.js does PDF rendering in-browser and in-sandbox, doing SWF rendering in-browser and in-sandbox makes the security nightmare that is Flash go away.

ADDED: Mozilla blogging about security benefits of PDF.js, which apply here too to

http://andreasgal.com/2011/06/15/pdf-js/

Re: HTML5 Flash Player (Shumway) lands in Mozilla

#57

Post by captainmuon »

I wonder whether this supports all the simple animation features that made flash big back in the day (like vector animation, tweening, etc.). When people say HTML5+js is the replacement for Flash, they usually think about video players and ActionScript apps.

I also wonder, if you go through all the trouble of creating a new flash implementation, why do it in HTML+js? Why not in native code on top of a cross-platform library, such as Skia or Qt? Security is one issue, but if you start a new project you can plan for security from the start and effectively rule out buffer overflows etc. with the right programming practices. Also all modern OSes have ways to sandbox applications.

I'd very much rather have my code in small, auditable, removable plugins than put everything and the kitchen sink in the browser. Sure, you prevent buffer overflow exploits by using a well tested JS engine, but you get a load of other possible bugs that you wouldn't have if the plugin were in a separate process (DoS/hanging the browser, information leakage, cross origin scripting, etc.).

Re: HTML5 Flash Player (Shumway) lands in Mozilla

#58

Post by captainmuon »

Bjoern wrote: post #30
Wintamute wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no real conceptual difference between a element, a element, a WebGL experience, a NaCl app or a Flash on your webpage. They're all somewhat non-semantic, hard to search, rich media black boxes. So what's your particular beef with Flash, especially when rendered via HTML5? Or do you just hate all tools that enable creativity beyond a plain text website equally? Or did you just drink the Flash-should-die KoolAi…

Draining excessively my CPU and Memory for no good reason, being insecure, etc.

I suspect this will not use less memory and CPU than a native plugin.

Re: HTML5 Flash Player (Shumway) lands in Mozilla

#59

Post by captainmuon »

spongle wrote: post #46
roarroar wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's so great about the "security model" of the browser? It's a patch work of horrible decisions.

Nothing at all. It's shit. But one security model is better than having two security models.

If the components are sufficiently isolated, I'd much rather have many smaller components (with individual security models) than one monolithic system.

That's why e.g. the Unity3d plugin is so great. A complete 3D engine (with state of the art graphics, the ability to load almost any 3d format on earth, ...) does not belong into the browser. I don't want that code on my work PC.

OTOH, its great to have the ability to run games in the browser. The performance is much better than WebGL (because it contains compiled code, and because it is a complete, tuned, engine and not just an opengl implementation). And it's fairly safe, since it's built with Mono/.NET, you don't have problems with shellcode injection etc..

Re: HTML5 Flash Player (Shumway) lands in Mozilla

#60

Post by captainmuon »

trycatch wrote: post #34

I tried to use it ~1 month ago, it wasn't a great experience. I tried playing video and several games on Kongregate, and almost nothing worked, except Flash ads (only few games showed anything similar to loading screen -- most of them just didn't start at all). But the most problematic thing was its slowness. Even small almost static ads brought entire Firefox to its knees. I am looking forward for this project, but…

Same thing here. I can't run silly stick man games from ~2004 on my laptop I bought 3 years ago with this.

Just like PDF.js, it's brilliant on my desktop, but unusable on my trusty old netbook (that could do this things prefectly well with native code).

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