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HTML5 Flash Player (Shumway) lands in Mozilla

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Re: HTML5 Flash Player (Shumway) lands in Mozilla

#141

Post by davexunit »

robmcm wrote: post #131
davexunit wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's a disadvantage for the user, and an advantage for the business. The user is the one that matters here.

Re: HTML5 Flash Player (Shumway) lands in Mozilla

#142

Post by evilpie »

eksith wrote: post #5

This is great news. Now if only Mozilla made it easy to remove plugins just as other addons[1], we'll be all set. [1] At present, you'll need to go to [your install folder]\extensions or check their path. To do this, go to about:config and set 'plugin.expose_full_path' to 'true'. Now go to about:plugins where you'll see the full install path. Go to these and delete the .dll Edit: Globally installed plugins, may affec…

plugin.expose_full_path does nothing and about:plugins always shows the full url nowadays.

Re: HTML5 Flash Player (Shumway) lands in Mozilla

#143

Post by Smily »

Tloewald wrote: post #92
Wintamute wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> WebGL has the advantage of delivering very lightweight and efficient graphic effects, whereas even native Flash was horribly inefficient at doing what it did. Fundamentally incorrect. Flash is actually an incredibly efficient file format for rich media, especially at vector animation. Look it up, you can fit amazing animations into just a few kb. Nothing can beat it on the web today for that purpose, and the Flash…

Flash's file format is fine w.r.t. compression. (It's beastly to parse, but that's a consequence of history.) It does a terrible job of rendering graphics though (probably because the guys who wrote the lowest level parts of the engine did so a long time ago and have moved on). When Steve Jobs wrote his letter about Flash a big part of the deal was Flash's impact on battery life because it was so inefficient -- and A…

A single bouncing circle on a rectangle doesn't count as a benchmark in my opinion. Flash can be written in a performant manner, it used to be faster than HTML for almost everything, but that gap has narrowed for some specific things.

Most of all though, in my experience, Flash is usually more consistent across browsers and operating systems. Even if it's slower than the fastest browser, it's at least consistently slower.

When dealing with the desktop and/or applications on mobile devices that support AIR (i.e. supported runtimes), graphics rendering isn't an issue anymore. If you are really stuck with poor graphics performance using the traditional methods, you can just leverage Stage3D, which is just like WebGL, except it has a compatibility layer and is constrained in some ways, which can potentially make it more compatible with different underlying architectures and across more GPUs.

Going back to benchmarks though, I believe that 95% (pulled out of my behindus) of benchmarks have poorly written code / code that could be optimized to run an order of magnitude faster, so I won't engage in a benchmark fling-fest. I can at least link a few minor tests I made a while ago where I encountered the above mentioned inconsistency issues:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Av4YDog3VfA-dHI...

Re: HTML5 Flash Player (Shumway) lands in Mozilla

#144

Post by belorn »

takluyver wrote: post #140
m_mueller wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Correct. I recommend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iceweasel#History_and_origin_o... for more information. Please note this:

  The artwork in Firefox had a proprietary copyright license.
As for the license:

  The rebranded programs are available under Mozilla's 
  standard MPL/GPL/LGPL tri-license. Like Mozilla, the 
  default icons are under the same tri-license, but unlike 
  Mozilla, there are no trademark restrictions.

Re: HTML5 Flash Player (Shumway) lands in Mozilla

#145

Post by roarroar »

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.

So.. stay with the shit model forever? Good idea! NaCl is part of an effort to fix all this bullshit, and it's at least sort of going in the right direction.

Re: HTML5 Flash Player (Shumway) lands in Mozilla

#146

Post by belorn »

pjmlp wrote: post #89
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.

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

On the positive side, apache has a strong patent clause. It was so much admired, that FSF used it for GPLv3 (with the single adjustment regarding patent agreements).

Re: HTML5 Flash Player (Shumway) lands in Mozilla

#147

Post by mtrimpe »

Terretta wrote: post #104
willvarfar wrote: post #54

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/

> doing SWF rendering in-browser and in-sandbox makes the security nightmare that is Flash go away I think it's crucial to make sure end users concerned with security understand the difference between built-in or bundled Adobe Flash Player (Google Chrome style), and what Firefox is offering. As soon as Chrome added a built-in Flash Player, it became the preferred target for hack contests, and still falls over repeate…

> I think it's crucial to make sure end users understand the difference between built-in or bundled Adobe Flash Player

And please, for the love of all that is holy, also make sure they understand what it might mean for the stability of features such as video recording.

Over the past few years Chrome has repeatedly shipped PepperFlash versions with various degrees of brokenness for video recording; wreaking havoc for webcam based services across the web.

Ironically enough these issues are extra hard to address, because when you tell Chrome users to 'try another browser' they all go "Nahh. I'm already on the best one."

Re: HTML5 Flash Player (Shumway) lands in Mozilla

#148

Post by broodbucket »

Bill_Dimm wrote: post #108
broodbucket wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing something like HURD, some people will still work on it but it won't be the focus of anything. I haven't had any success with Gnash, it can (choppily) play YouTube (which now has HTML5) and nothing else worked.

YouTube (which now has HTML5) Sadly, YouTube videos that have embedded ads seem to be Flash-only.

You can still watch them with HTML5 using this addon for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/youtube-all-h...

I'm assuming there's a Chrome equivalent. I've completely disabled Flash in my browser now. Feels good.

Re: HTML5 Flash Player (Shumway) lands in Mozilla

#150

Post by candeira »

davexunit wrote: post #83
zeckalpha wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't GPL, so I'm assuming work will go on.

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.

Some years ago I wrote a comment on Slashdot[1] where I researched what GNU software isn't copyleft. Copying it here because it took me almost 20 minutes to find it again, and I want the info to gain some Google juice so I can find it next time I need it (maybe in 6 years?):

[1] http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=225606&cid=18272276

>>> NOTE: This was true as of 2007

These are all the GNU packages not under a copyleft license I have been able to verify. I have tried to err on the side of caution, which means all the packages listed here are GNU and not copyleft, but there might be some non-copyleft GNU packages that I have failed to list:

    Kawa [fsf.org]: licensed under the Kawa License [gnu.org], which is an X-11/MIT style license. Kawa is a Scheme/Emacs Lisp environment that runs on Java, in case you were wondering.
    GNU less [fsf.org]: the page says it is licensed under a SimplePermissiveNowarranty, but if you download the latest less tarball from ftp.gnu.org [gnu.org], you will find it is GPLd. However, older versions of less were non-copyleft [gnu.org], and they still are, as you can still download them.
    Ncurses [gnu.org], which is distributed under an X11-style license.
    Proto [fsf.org], which is is a tool for finding C and C++ function prototypes (someone please explain to me what that means), in the Public Domain. This one is not downloadable from the GNU ftp, but I guess that, if they list it as a GNU project, it must be.
    Quexo [fsf.org], xquery implementation using Kawa to compile to java bytecode. Under the Kawa license, which means an X11-style license.
    Speex [fsf.org], an audio compression codec for voice, under the Xiph.org license (a modified BSD)
At least one other non-GNU programs is listed as being GNU on the directory, like Slib [fsf.org], a portable scheme library, which under a simple permissive non-warranty license.
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