Flash Player renaissance with webassembly

Byadmin

Quick History for:

January 1, 1996; 25 years ago a internet browser plugin named FutureWave became popular for allowing browser to display vector graphics. The software was bought and improved by big companies culminating at the dawn of the Smart Phone era when it was the most popular software installed on over 90% of internet connected PC.

It’s decline took almost a decade and finally it happened in 2020.

Enter Web Assemly

Flash player content was created and distributed in a file format SWF.

Because there is a huge amount of SWF on the web ( games, animations, apps ) people started looking into creating a player for it using the WASM feature of modern browsers. ( This feature allows playback of c++ code at near native speeds inside the browsers). Here are the top projects I found

Ruffe:

This is the most popular project and with a lot of contributers and community support.

They have a demo website where you can load swf to see if they play. The projects is open source on github

Here is the discod. They are looking for Rust Devs, donations. They also offer instructions on how to enable it on your website.

There are also Chrome Extensions & Firefox extensions based on ruffe.

CheepX

Is a payed alternative that seems to have better as3 support. This projects is different than ruffe in that it emulates a x86 operating system inside Web Assembly. It then loads the FlashPlayer Linux binaries and plays it. So it would be a virtual machine inside another virtual machine.

This Medium articlol goes in depth

Here is a video explaining how it works:

SWF2JS

This is not that popular but it plays as2 content and as3. Here is there github

Less popular but preaty advanced ( free ActionScript 2 ) they also offer a test demo where you can check if it supports your swf

WAFlash

Coming out of Asia ( Korea ) there is a alternative to ruffe ( used some of the ruffe codebase ) though they don’t have the code open source or any license available. The original repo no source code though.

Here is the latest website built with it vidkidz.tistory.com and here is there discord (Korean)