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Shumway: a SWF interpreter entirely in JavaScript

benjamin.smedbergs.us

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Re: Shumway: a SWF interpreter entirely in JavaScript

#51

Post by tedmielczarek »

cookiecaper wrote: post #42
pserwylo wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A PDF file is just words and pictures on a page >They don't include animations, they don't accept user input, they don't connect to servers and stream files and send updates A PDF file is much more than just words and pictures. There are forms which accept user input, weird embedded content, and other strange things. Although I am not familiar with the spec, I have seen the features that Adobe Acrobat lets you do wi…

Right, but what percentage of the esoteric features technically supported by PDFs are actually in use? With the exception of forms, the huge, overwhelming majority of PDFs never use things like embedded objects (which, funnily enough, can sometimes be Flash files). And forms are definitely doable in a JavaScript PDF reader; they are, in fact, probably easier than in a native PDF reader since you'll be able to use HTM…

We already have a thing that's capable of real-time graphics and real-time user input, it's called a web browser. This is simply leveraging that to run a different set of input.

Re: Shumway: a SWF interpreter entirely in JavaScript

#52

Post by async5 »

chadaustin wrote: post #26
camus wrote: post #25

this project is a waste of time. The problem is not the player , but how flash can output content that use standard browser apis. This kind of emulation is a good demo , but doesnt work in the real world. Why whould i use that ? old browser will never support that tech ( It makes more sense to build tools similar to flash IDE that can export to HTML5 than wasting time trying to make legacy code run slow and blow up t…

It's not a waste of time for two reasons: 1) If it works, then it shows how far browser technology has come. Real examples are meaningful. 2) SWF files are content. In a Flash-less world we'd have no ability to experience Dice Wars or most Kongregate games or http://raditts.com/phyles/xiao3.swf Consider this project an emulator for old things. :)

> or http://raditts.com/phyles/xiao3.swf

I was looking for this movie. Thanks!

Re: Shumway: a SWF interpreter entirely in JavaScript

#53

Post by malandrew »

malandrew wrote: post #41
camus wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's the point , you cant keep up with the latest flash version = fail . You cant get good performances = fail , you cant run it on old browsers that dont have flash = fail . Nobody needs that. This has already been done , all the projects have failed. If i had skills i would not waste my time trying to fit a triangle in a star , i would develop tools to make perfect fitting stars. That's what people want.

Interestingly this has been my opinion of all the projects that attempt to create a bridge between native mobile APIS and javascript like phonegap and trigger.io. Don't get me know, they've been noble useful effects, but a lot of that effort should have going into projects like WebKit and Firefox to bring those native APIs to the browsers themselves.

Doh!

"Don't get me wrong, they've been noble useful efforts" not "Don't get me know, they've been noble useful effects"

Stupid autocorrect. TBH I prefer typos than autocorrect. At least with typos it looks like a typo instead of making you look like an idiot.

Re: Shumway: a SWF interpreter entirely in JavaScript

#54

Post by BrendanEich »

cmccabe wrote: post #47
BrendanEich wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Platforms where Flash is not supported by Adobe, or not allowed by the OS vendor: - Linux - Win8 Metro, depending on the whitelist contents - iPad - iPhone - FirefoxOS (neé B2G) As Stan the Man says, 'nuff said! /be

I think we pretty much all agree that flash is dead on mobile. That includes iPad, iPhone, Android, and so forth. On the desktop, it's a bit of a different story. Chrome supports Flash on Linux quite well. Internet Explorer also has Flash baked in. There is some whitelisting if you are in "tablet mode"-- or so I am told. It seems like for a normal computer you should be able to turn off tablet mode, though. I wish Mo…

I wish I had a dollar for every time someone wished that Mozilla did more anti-leveraged work in the past.

@supercoder's point about skating where the puck used to be has truth in it, and we do not aim to over-invest in Flash via Shumway now (and we avoided it before; perhaps we should have done more, but the only temporarily-winning effort I know of was Chrome's, which required a business deal with Adobe and a tremendous amount of engineering effort on Google's side).

On the other hand, as Jet Villegas's blog post points out, we also uplift the web and smooth out uneven APIs and performance curves by researching Shumway. If Flash requires some greater JS performance, or some API gap to be filled, Shumway is the most direct way to find out. It's well within Mozilla Research's ambit, and not backward-looking, to explore this space.

Finally, if we can deploy Shumway as a previewer and reduce actual Flashplayer plugin instantiations greatly, with as good or better user experience in terms of jank, CPU utilization, battery life, etc. -- and with some black-video-frame-of-death saves on my iPad, should Shumway be supported there -- that helps in the coming years as Flash lingers on in the "desktop web".

But make no mistake: the growth curve for mobile devices and the lack of Flash there will kill Flash. All those restaurant sites that sunk their discretionary web content development budgets in Flash years ago? They are re-investing rapidly to work on iOS devices. I don't see Flash rallying on desktop, or even via Air on Android.

Add this all up and I believe Shumway can avoid the forever-a-toy status. Flash is proprietary tech, in spite of SWF being opened up in recent years. Its single main implementation code is its spec. This hurts when the single implementation is evolving rapidly, but as that implementation slows down and (outside of Air and games, let's say) declines, the 90%-coverage "toys" become real tools, with the right integration.

This could have applied to Gnash or swfdec in the past, but at significantly higher cost, not only in direct engineering costs and opportunity costs to web-perf/API-uplift, but also in securing yet more piles of native VM code.

/be

Re: Shumway: a SWF interpreter entirely in JavaScript

#55

Post by html5web »

BrendanEich wrote: post #54
cmccabe wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we pretty much all agree that flash is dead on mobile. That includes iPad, iPhone, Android, and so forth. On the desktop, it's a bit of a different story. Chrome supports Flash on Linux quite well. Internet Explorer also has Flash baked in. There is some whitelisting if you are in "tablet mode"-- or so I am told. It seems like for a normal computer you should be able to turn off tablet mode, though. I wish Mo…

I wish I had a dollar for every time someone wished that Mozilla did more anti-leveraged work in the past. @supercoder's point about skating where the puck used to be has truth in it, and we do not aim to over-invest in Flash via Shumway now (and we avoided it before; perhaps we should have done more, but the only temporarily-winning effort I know of was Chrome's, which required a business deal with Adobe and a treme…

May all your wishes come true, you deserve this Brendan!

Re: Shumway: a SWF interpreter entirely in JavaScript

#56

Post by ThibaultImbert »

BrendanEich wrote: post #54
cmccabe wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we pretty much all agree that flash is dead on mobile. That includes iPad, iPhone, Android, and so forth. On the desktop, it's a bit of a different story. Chrome supports Flash on Linux quite well. Internet Explorer also has Flash baked in. There is some whitelisting if you are in "tablet mode"-- or so I am told. It seems like for a normal computer you should be able to turn off tablet mode, though. I wish Mo…

I wish I had a dollar for every time someone wished that Mozilla did more anti-leveraged work in the past. @supercoder's point about skating where the puck used to be has truth in it, and we do not aim to over-invest in Flash via Shumway now (and we avoided it before; perhaps we should have done more, but the only temporarily-winning effort I know of was Chrome's, which required a business deal with Adobe and a treme…

I seriously believe that Shumway is a very cool research project to demonstrate what is possible in modern browsers. But I just want to highlight a few things:

1. You mention that this can help in terms of CPU utilization, battery life, etc. Would be great, still today, the very simple (non AS3/vector based) Racing game (http://mozilla.github.com/shumway/examples/racing/) you are running through Shumway requires around 70% of CPU usage on my MacBook Pro against 11% with Flash Player. A game which would consume even less in Flash Player if it used AS3 and simple bitmap blitting techniques. Yes, JS performance will improve, and efforts like River Trail are promising, but we are still far from that, I am a little worried we are setting the wrong expectations here.

2. The restaurant websites. Yes, there are a lot of these restaurant websites using Flash. And to be fair, they should never have used Flash for that. But you are right most of them are porting these to HTML and it works nicely. But fortunately Flash on the web is not used for restaurant websites only, especially games. Today Flash Player is used to power 9 of the top 10 Facebook games with content like FarmVille 2, CityVille, Kings Road, Ruby Blast, Angry Birds targeting around 30 million daily users are powered with Flash Player using Stage3D and without Flash, we would all be playing Racing games like the one mentioned earlier. Or maybe faster games, but with NaCl in Chrome only? ;)

3. You don't see Flash rallying on desktop, or even via Air on Android. Thanks to Stage3D, AIR is actually becoming more and more serious for game developers. Most developers wanting to develop games on desktop, iOS and Android are facing big issues when it comes to fragmentation and AIR solves that. All the mobiles games here http://gaming.adobe.com/showcase/ are using AIR.

Thibault

Re: Shumway: a SWF interpreter entirely in JavaScript

#57

Post by junglecode »

ThibaultImbert wrote: post #56
BrendanEich wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I had a dollar for every time someone wished that Mozilla did more anti-leveraged work in the past. @supercoder's point about skating where the puck used to be has truth in it, and we do not aim to over-invest in Flash via Shumway now (and we avoided it before; perhaps we should have done more, but the only temporarily-winning effort I know of was Chrome's, which required a business deal with Adobe and a treme…

I seriously believe that Shumway is a very cool research project to demonstrate what is possible in modern browsers. But I just want to highlight a few things: 1. You mention that this can help in terms of CPU utilization, battery life, etc. Would be great, still today, the very simple (non AS3/vector based) Racing game ( http://mozilla.github.com/shumway/examples/racing/ ) you are running through Shumway requires ar…

1. CPU utilization will get better. We have a lot of low-hanging fruit yet to harvest (eg. the playerglobal built-ins aren't JIT'ed yet as we dogfood the interpreter.)

2. Facebook games running Flash are still a huge % of crashers for all Flash-enabled browsers. We'd like to help that. As browsers like Chrome sandbox away Flash's ability to be faster than the browser (i.e no more direct GPU access on Pepper) then Shumway becomes much more attractive, especially on mobile platforms for which there is no Flash Player.

3. SWF as a packaging format for app store deployment is a pale shadow of what we set out to do when we started working on it years ago. SWF could still outlive us all (like JPEG, HTML etc.) Shumway may well be the best bet to keep it alive.

--Jet

Re: Shumway: a SWF interpreter entirely in JavaScript

#58

Post by BrendanEich »

ThibaultImbert wrote: post #56
BrendanEich wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I had a dollar for every time someone wished that Mozilla did more anti-leveraged work in the past. @supercoder's point about skating where the puck used to be has truth in it, and we do not aim to over-invest in Flash via Shumway now (and we avoided it before; perhaps we should have done more, but the only temporarily-winning effort I know of was Chrome's, which required a business deal with Adobe and a treme…

I seriously believe that Shumway is a very cool research project to demonstrate what is possible in modern browsers. But I just want to highlight a few things: 1. You mention that this can help in terms of CPU utilization, battery life, etc. Would be great, still today, the very simple (non AS3/vector based) Racing game ( http://mozilla.github.com/shumway/examples/racing/ ) you are running through Shumway requires ar…

1. We're not done yet, rather at an early stage.

2&3. I did write "(outside of Air and games, let's say)". Did you miss that?

See also Emscripten, which produces GC-free well-typed JS. We're also working in Mozilla Research to show Emscripten + JS can competes on performance, and excel on reach, with alternative single-browser and proprietary approaches.

/be

Re: Shumway: a SWF interpreter entirely in JavaScript

#59

Post by robin_reala »

freditup wrote: post #46
BrendanEich wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem up-to-date on AS3 but not on JS. JS has typedarrays (even in IE10) now. /be

Sure, but from what you said I'm guessing that they don't work in IE9, which is what I mean about cross-browser issues. Plus, TypedArrays are somewhat clumsy maybe? It seems as if JS is the future, and that's not necessarily a bad thing, but it would be nice if JS had a few more features to make it easier to use. I personally wouldn't be opposed to starting clean (with something like Dart) but that's probably unreali…

Flash doesn’t work at all on iOS and current/future Android devices. That a fairly serious cross-browser issue in my eyes.

Re: Shumway: a SWF interpreter entirely in JavaScript

#60

Post by ThibaultImbert »

BrendanEich wrote: post #58
ThibaultImbert wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I seriously believe that Shumway is a very cool research project to demonstrate what is possible in modern browsers. But I just want to highlight a few things: 1. You mention that this can help in terms of CPU utilization, battery life, etc. Would be great, still today, the very simple (non AS3/vector based) Racing game ( http://mozilla.github.com/shumway/examples/racing/ ) you are running through Shumway requires ar…

1. We're not done yet, rather at an early stage. 2&3. I did write "(outside of Air and games, let's say)". Did you miss that? See also Emscripten, which produces GC-free well-typed JS. We're also working in Mozilla Research to show Emscripten + JS can competes on performance, and excel on reach, with alternative single-browser and proprietary approaches. /be

1. Ok, thanks for the info. Just tell people, cause people will get defensive otherwise.

2/3. Yep, I missed that. Fair ;)

Yes, I have been following Emscripten and it is promising. No doubt clearly on the excel on reach just some remaining doubts on the performance and CPU/battery usage.

If you guys truly want to have this valuable, also make sure the entire system is consistent, like Flash, and not just in Firefox.

As I said, it is a neat research project, I will keep watching Shumway grow :)

Thibault

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