Mozilla Pushes "Shumway" Flash Into Firefox

[benmoran]

Flash performance under Linux is pathetic as it is, so It wouldn't bother me if Shumway ends up being 2x as slow. Flash is pretty much legacy at this point anyhow, so the only reason for a Flash implementation is going to be legacy support for sites that don't get updated. In a few years, the performance won't matter so much anymore. The platform independence and relative future-proofing of a js implementation makes it well worth the tradeoff in my eyes.

Then again, Flash performance is so aweful it also wouldn't surprise me if Mozilla's implementation ended up being faster, just because of how shit the Adobe one is.

[Pajn]

Well in that case it doesn't seem to be very fast. My Firefox (it is enabled) is very laggy on JavaScript heavy sites.

asm.js doesn't speed up regular JavaScript. It only speeds up JavaScript that explicitly states that it uses asm.js which means that it can be parsed as bytecode instead of JavaScript. It is intended for sites that writes their logic in C/C++ and then compiles their code to JavaScript.

asm.js is just a way to output bytecode in a JavaScript compatible way (kind of like Native Client but compatible with browsers that doesn't support it).

[leamas]

performance-wise, shumwy is the only hope...

There is a lot of flash video content out there, mandated by the copyright owners for drm reasons (unless they mandate the dreaded Silverlight, like Netflix). For Linux users, the real bottleneck is that the flash on linux doesn't do hardware acceleration. Since shumway uses the ordinary backends for rendering, the gstreamer native backend is available which indeed is hw accelerated.

So, perhaps we'll be able to watch flash videos under Linux without CPU decoding before flash is replaced (the hls encoded streams must also be handled...) I don't really see any other realistic alternative by now.

[Dreyeth]

You can install it all you want, getting firefox to use it though

You can install shumway all you want, but is there a actual shred of documentation on getting firefox to actually
use it, without displaying please go download flash errors?

I do not even care if it doesn't work very well at all yet, I just want absolute confirmation that firefox
is atleast trying to use it at all.
I want to see the progress with it, what loads and what doesn't, and a shred of documentation
on how to ensure firefox is using it.

Out of all these projects to produce a open source flash player, why haven't any of them produced anything usable?
Many projects can clone a entire operating system, why the hell is it so hard to code something to can play flash?

About flash being out moded, currently if there is anything embed in a page besides html or css and maybe a little javascript
when it comes to other content 99% of the time its flash (I open a java embed application about once every two years).

And it doesn't seem to be going away either, flash is still going to be here for a long long time, just running flash
on firefox using the open source driver regularly, just about freezes linux (total lockup because of software rendering).

Its a pipe dream that flash isn't going to be here for atleast another decade, and if anyone is using linux as a desktop
they won't have firefox installed in the future because the software rendering on the flash plugin can lockup up a high
end intel or amd 4-8 core cpu.

Firefox's currently life expectancy is as long as it takes the current flash plugin to become end of life, before
users install chrome and thats if they haven't already, waiting for flash to be replaced and people to stop using,
well people are going to be installing chromium first.

I want to vampire stake flash for the adware, monitoring and other shit at has forced upon the internet and I love firefox,
frankly though flash is used for more then just video streaming (I don't really use it for that though but others do),
and when flash goes end of life I might have to look for another browser.