Mozilla's Open Source Project Shumway To Translate SWF To HTML5 57
An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla currently has an experimental project on github called Shumway to try to interpret SWF (aka Flash files) using browser-standard technologies like HTML5 and JavaScript. All I can say is please and thank you! 'Shumway is an HTML5 technology experiment that explores building a faithful and efficient renderer for the SWF file format without native code assistance. Shumway is community-driven and supported by Mozilla. Our goal is to create a general-purpose, web standards-based platform for parsing and rendering SWFs. Integration with Firefox is a possibility if the experiment proves successful.'" It's not the first such attempt; here's a post from a few years back about one called Smokescreen, and another about QuickTime programmer Steve Perlman's subscription-based workaround for iDevices.
Re:Google Swiffy (Score:2, Insightful)
Swiffy is a service that "compiles" into a json file that a browser plugin can then use. I would imagine a closed source server side solution is even less appealing to mozilla than a closed source client side solution... It is to me at least.
Mozilla, those crazy idealists (Score:4, Insightful)
Whatever you think about Mozilla's products, experiments or strategies, they are working for a free web.
It's more than admirable, it's good for the web to have them around.
Great (Score:4, Insightful)
Now we only need a project that converts HTML5 to something that can be rendered uniformly on all major browsers.