Mozilla Pushes "Shumway" Flash Into Firefox

[Ibidem]

NO! Say it ain't so! A javascript implementation of flash did not work without javascript.

So in the end you came to say that it doesn't work for your pc yet.

If you read the rest of the quote, you would see that I was referring to pdf.js, in response to a comment about pdf.js.

But my expectation is that Shumway would be miserably slow here.

[bwat47]

Well when they came out with their Javascript PDF reader it mostly worked, but not as well as standalone readers already available, and there was no reason whatsoever to use it. And Mozilla themselves would post messages saying, "this document may not have rendered correctly (even when it did), you should probably use a different PDF reader!" No kidding guys, so why have you changed my settings to use this one? I expect Shumway to be similar. At least there is a decent reason to create it, given the problems with Flash and Adobe's dropping support.

By the way, is the Firefox PDF reader good yet? Is there any reason at all to use it?

It works fine for my needs, but I don't deal with PDF's much. I'd wager it does the job just fine for many users that only need a basic reader. Only problem I've seen is it can be sluggish with large pdf's.

[LightBit]

I hope the "Shumway" is much faster than Adobe's plugin. Sure, Adobe's linux plugin works, but if you take the occasion to play a flash game or stream HD content online, the Adobe plugin really shows its weaknesses.

Shumway is written in JavaScript, so I doubt. It's probably much slower.

[AJSB]

Doesn't work with www.gametrailers.com

[Ericg]

Shumway is written in JavaScript, so I doubt. It's probably much slower.

Can't you shove javascript through LLVM IR to get basically C++ performance out of it? I know you can do the reverse (C++ ---> LLVM ---> JS) but I could've sworn I saw a project to take the JS and make it into C++

[LightBit]

Can't you shove javascript through LLVM IR to get basically C++ performance out of it? I know you can do the reverse (C++ ---> LLVM ---> JS) but I could've sworn I saw a project to take the JS and make it into C++

Maybe, but Firefox doesn't do that.

[RahulSundaram]

Maybe, but Firefox doesn't do that.

They developed and use http://asmjs.org/ in all such applications. It is significantly faster than regular JS

[Kostas]

I found their .pdf reader to be very usable. Doubt there's more than 1% of cases it completely messes up. Can't see shumway being defaulted anytime soon though..

[Ericg]

They developed and use http://asmjs.org/ in all such applications. It is significantly faster than regular JS

Thats what I was thinking of, thanks Rahul. I knew they had something that was closer-to-metal than normal JS

[TheBlackCat]

I found their .pdf reader to be very usable. Doubt there's more than 1% of cases it completely messes up.

Have you tried copying and pasting text from it?