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HTML5 Flash Player (Shumway) lands in Mozilla

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Re: HTML5 Flash Player (Shumway) lands in Mozilla

#131

Post by robmcm »

davexunit wrote: post #100
robmcm wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash#SwfDec Adobe actually made their Flash money from tooling and supporting services. If they open sourced the spec and turned it into a commitie it would be in the same mess as HTML 5 and lose it's advantages (fast development, adoption for example).

It suffers from the biggest disadvantage of all: being proprietary. Flash is a massive wart on the free web.

That's a double edged sword, proprietary software moves much much faster which is why plugins like flash came about. They plugged the gaps required that the web working groups couldn't agree on.

If proprietary was such a big disadvantage why would it exist at all?

Re: HTML5 Flash Player (Shumway) lands in Mozilla

#132

Post by robmcm »

Tloewald wrote: post #113
robmcm wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is aimed at legacy support, I don't think anyone would target this as a supported runtime. Ironically most of the useful flash applications/games etc wouldn't run on these runtimes as they are using features not supported in HTML5. This sort of thing works best for crappy adverts and banners, which no one really wants anyway. This is highlighted by the fact the big competitor (Gordon?) is developed by th…

If it were widely adopted, people would target it. If it's not widely adopted, who cares?

It's adopted by having a HTML 5 compliant browser, at which point you would just use HTML 5 tools.

Unless you really loved the flash IDE which I guess some people do...

Re: HTML5 Flash Player (Shumway) lands in Mozilla

#133

Post by robmcm »

DavidBradbury wrote: post #127
rplnt wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd be afraid that I lose control of the flash with this. As things are now, I can safely disable the flash plugin and everything is fine. If someone is able to render flash within HTML5, how can I prevent it from doing so?

Anything that this can do, JavaScript can do. If you're worried about losing control with JavaScript, then you should already have that disabled.

It's this sort of person who will be calling to bring back flash, so all the annoying banners and CPU intensive code can be easily blocked.

Re: HTML5 Flash Player (Shumway) lands in Mozilla

#134

Post by pjmlp »

icebraining wrote: post #102
pjmlp wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is great for the companies that take open source into their products and never return anything back.

GPL isn't about (nor does it require) licensees to contribute anything back.

Hence the need of AGPL.

I do a lot of development with closed source software as well, but when I do open source, I take the point of only using copyleft licenses.

Re: HTML5 Flash Player (Shumway) lands in Mozilla

#135

Post by Tloewald »

richardjs wrote: post #124
Tloewald wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, we assume it's more secure than simply running Flash, but we don't know. In fact it increases the overall attack surface since now there's bugs in Adobe's implementation and bugs in this implementation to exploit. Let's suppose we believe our site to be secure because we've tested it on Windows and Mac and checked the flash doesn't cause issues, and we've tested it on mobile and the flash simply doesn't work. N…

Fair enough. You have to be careful taking this argument too far, though, or you end up saying something like no other browser besides IE should be developed, because it increases the attack surface. Ultimately, individual users have to take charge of their own individual attack surface. If switching from one Flash player to another increases their personal security, it's a good thing.

Fair point. Any argument taken to extremes is probably a bad thing.

In general, I'd say replacing things with emulations of things is not a good way to get better reliability, performance, or security -- now you have bugs in the original thing and the emulation of the thing to consider.

In this case, the emulation lives within a restricted runtime environment and the real thing doesn't. But that's a performance / resource consumption / convenience / compatibility hit in exchange for "security", and those tend to fail simply because most people like their performance / resource consumption / convenience / compatibility.

Re: HTML5 Flash Player (Shumway) lands in Mozilla

#136

Post by mbebenita »

Pxtl wrote: post #95

So when ActionScript is compiled to JS, do they mean it's actually pure JS, or is this getting converted into ASM.JS? Historically, a big appeal of Flash vs. JS has been performance - ActionScript is an ugly language, but it's statically typed. And JS/canvas/whatever historically haven't been too efficient at moving vectored objects around the screen. Then again, a the factor in Flash's favour isn't the run-time, its…

Shumway compiles ActionScript bytecode to JavaScript source. It cannot target ASM.JS because not all ActionScript code is typed. The goal of Shumway is to identify what is missing from the web platform and fix it, so we're working on improving graphics performance.

Re: HTML5 Flash Player (Shumway) lands in Mozilla

#137

Post by kapowaz »

Recoil42 wrote: post #125
kapowaz wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There may not be any conceptual difference, but there is a very significant difference in how these things you describe are used. Flash, when used badly, becomes a self-contained sandbox for the entire experience of a website. Besides security concerns, this approach is damaging to the overall experience of that site, since developers end up needing to re-implement native controls and functionality (scrollbars, form…

>Flash, when used badly, becomes a self-contained sandbox for the entire experience of a website. This same argument is true for Canvas, SVG, WebGL etc.

This is true, but because of completely different toolchains it's very rarely the case that this happens. Flash, at its height, was being used with tools like Flex to build full applications. Adobe provided interface libraries for you to substitute native controls for its own (inferior) versions. Nothing like this exists yet for the tools you mention, and hopefully never will..

Re: HTML5 Flash Player (Shumway) lands in Mozilla

#138

Post by runn1ng »

TheEskimo wrote: post #106
runn1ng wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can make "GPL version" with 1 fork though.

That is not true. The people who contributed the original Shunway code own the copyright to it. They are choosing to license it under Apache. You cannot change that since you do not own the copyright. They may choose to "relicense" it under GPL if all the contributed agree. What you suggest cannot legally be done. However, Apache is GPL compatible, so it can still be used in a GPL project, though its license will not…

Yeah, but you can do a simple change and suddenly it's derivative and you can licence it as GPL.

Re: HTML5 Flash Player (Shumway) lands in Mozilla

#139

Post by icebraining »

pjmlp wrote: post #134
icebraining wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPL isn't about (nor does it require) licensees to contribute anything back.

Hence the need of AGPL. I do a lot of development with closed source software as well, but when I do open source, I take the point of only using copyleft licenses.

The AGPL doesn't either. We have a product based on a third-party AGPL licensed codebase and we're fully compliant even if we don't contribute everything back.

You should really read up on the licenses and the intent behind them; contributing back was never the point.

Re: HTML5 Flash Player (Shumway) lands in Mozilla

#140

Post by takluyver »

m_mueller wrote: post #126
davexunit wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is Apache v2 licensed, which means that Shumway is free software. So, if Shumway functions adequately then I imagine that the FSF will consider the task complete. Believe it or not, the FSF and the GNU project don't demand that everything be GPL licensed.

Since Apache can be relicensed as I understand, doesn't that mean GNU people could just slap GPL on there if that's what stops them using it? Isn't this how they usually integrate FF anyways, by renaming it something to something like Icyfox and changing its license?

'Iceweasel' is the branding Debian applies to Firefox (and 'Icedove' for Thunderbird). That's nothing to do with the code license, it's specifically about trademark and copyright on the names and logos.
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