Surprise Ruffle support in an unsupported build Topic is solved

[Mæstro]

Since I have got my XP virtual machine up and running, I have thought it would be fun running Shockwave in it. This is the sort of thing which I would have done in my ordinary PM profile, if not for the fact that no Linux Shockwave was ever released. For this purpose, I installed Shockwave 8 from the Archive and set it to install. Since some of the sites from my childhood which I know to have used Shockwave also used Flash, possibly in their interfacing, I had gone to install that also. After both Flash 32 and 34 failed to install, I chose to install Flash 8 from an ISO saved in the Internet Archive. This worked as intended as far as Internet Explorer 6 and ActiveX were concerned, with the caveat that IE6 needs live Flash sites from Gensokyo, for the Archive’s automatic Ruffle deployment predictably breaks archived test sites.*

With this background, we can come to the big discovery. In Roy Tam’s New Moon for XP, three default plug-ins for Windows DRM were detected by the system, but not the Macromedia ones, so when I loaded the BrainPOP site above, Ruffle began to load, as I was used to seeing in official Pale Moon builds before reconfiguring per the advice I have got here before. I expected this to fail, as it presumably would in real Pale Moon, and started to look up old Mozilla docs for how to tell early Firefox (or New Moon) where to find my profile pictures. I had got distracted as a friend invited me for RP through IM, and when I looked again, I was greeted by the attached screenshot.

Because I understood that real Pale Moon and the UXP abstain from Rust and that Ruffle, which is made in Rust, is therefore incompatible with Pale Moon, this had caught me by complete surprise. What is going on here? Is this something Roy Tam decided to insert for his fork, or do Ruffle and Pale Moon proper get along than I supposed? I cannot test for myself in my ordinary Pale Moon install because I have got NPAPI support already entrenched, and I could only have discovered this before getting the plug-ins to work in my VM. Hence, I offer this extraordinary case for whatever the community might make of it, in the hope that it can benefit UXP development, even if we have got no need for Ruffle or an XP version.

*Loading these sites also reminded me how slow sites were to load in IE6; it was not just low bandwidth.

[Night Wing]

I mean this in jest.

Will wonders never cease. Glad to see you could get XP up and running in a virtual machine.

[jobbautista9]

The Ruffle player does work here in Pale Moon with Windows 11 as well (I had to disable my VLC and Flash plugins to force the Ruffle player to be loaded). I think both Pale Moon and Ruffle has made themselves more compatible with each other in recent years, with Pale Moon implementing WebComponents and Ruffle ensuring the WASM is supported by our engine. It has nothing to do with Rust not and never being in the platform (you can create a Rust-based WASM if you want to, the point of WASM is to be language-agnostic and translate everything into JavaScript bytecode which will then get compiled into machine code by the JavaScript engine, in the same way NPAPI and other plugin technologies may be programmed first in a high-level language but the end product is machine code compatible with a specific architecture)

[Mæstro]

Wow! It is happy to see more and more web design features agreeing with Pale Moon. Victories like these should be cherished.

Since we are on the general theme, how is Shockwave support in Pale Moon today on Windows? It is hard for me to test myself in Pale Moon proper without access to a Windows machine (my W7 Pro installation disc is in my other home, where I shall not be until March), but I have got some further curious results. In the virtual machine, a live Shockwave test woks in IE6 and NM28, running Shockwave 11, while a live Shockwave applet from 1997, which I remember running in XP natively twenty years ago, becomes stuck at the Shockwave loading screen, again in IE6, NM28 and Firefox 2. This occurs also if running from the offline version, so I know this is not due to dead assets. Running in W2000 mode, per the old plugin docs, does not help.

[UCyborg]

Shockwave doesn't work for me on Win11 23H2. Found version 12.3.5.205, most I get out of it is Shockwave splash screen.

Does this show initially for everything you load through it? I don't remember ever using it in the past, so haven't a clue about what to expect.

It also crashes when it's being unloaded.

Some forum thread here suggests version 10.3.0.24, this one doesn't even show up in Pale Moon. Doesn't seem to register plugin. I tried setting up registry entry manually pointing to C:\Windows\SysWOW64\Macromed\Shockwave 10\Plugin.dll, which claims to be Netscape plugin, but it still doesn't show.

Yes, I'm being mindful of testing with 32-bit Pale Moon and inspecting registry entries under WOW6432Node.

I noticed Ruffle tends to work these days in Pale Moon, but...it's slow...like everything that doesn't resemble retro web.

[Mæstro]

Yes, Shockwave 11 would give me the splash screen, but Shockwave 10·3 as you offered is working properly on PBS! I also see that the intended graphic on the first test site is a bouncing ball, analogous to the Flash graphic, not just the Shockwave logo, which as ‘a graphic’ misled me into believing the test worked sometimes.

At least for Roy Tam’s build, New Moon cannot detect plug-ins beyond the Microsoft defaults automatically, but Firefox 2 could. Copying the latter’s plug-in directory and giving it to the former is how I could point out both Shockwave and Flash’s presence to New Moon, no need for manual registry editing or other weirdness.