Flash vs. Ruffle

[Navigator]

[*]Watching. In 2019, a video website which had existed unchanged since 2005 shut down, and I had gone to the manual effort of saving several gigabytes of its material for posterity. All of this reel is in 240p and the contemporary Windows-based file types, for which I have been able to find codecs in my current Debian installation, but which are likely someday to be abandoned. The same can likely be said of my Flash file collection, as Linux developers have been content to let it fail as time passes.[/list]

I don't have many Flash files that I saved. (I wish I had saved more as I find that era nostalgic now.) I was pleased to find Ruffle and that it plays the Flash files that I do have. It is still receiving updates so I believe it is an active project.

[Mæstro]

I dislike Ruffle. It is far more processor-intensive than Flash, as evidenced by their relative effects on my processor’s temperature. I have also been regularly annoyed by websites automatically implementing Ruffle despite the fact that I still possess Flash proper. Its chief merit is for succeeding where Gnash failed to achieve much progress.

[Moonchild]

IMHO Ruffle is bad in many ways. It's incomplete, it does a lot of hackery to emulate flash in html5, it's overly heavy on resources, it's fragile, ... I can go on.

[Navigator]

IMHO Ruffle is bad in many ways. It's incomplete, it does a lot of hackery to emulate flash in html5, it's overly heavy on resources, it's fragile, ... I can go on.

Are there better alternatives?

[Mæstro]

Because of the considerable interest in the Windows 11 thread, I would like to create a thread here. Earlier parts of the Ruffle discussion could be moved hither.

Are there better alternatives?

I should say the Flash plugin itself. We will always keep supporting NPAPI, so we never need to worry about that.
Why reinvent the wheel?

[frostknight]

Are there better alternatives?

Lightspark might be one. I don't know. That's the only other one I know of that is being worked on still

[Moonchild]

Are there better alternatives?

Yes, use the Flash plugin!

[Mæstro]

I had thought that Ruffle ought to be a discussion in itself, but the community would rather continue the theme here, and I hold no objections to that. My post, which will be deleted as an independent thread but should go with the Ruffle discussion, seconds Moonchild:

Are there better alternatives?

I should say the Flash plugin itself. We will always keep supporting NPAPI, so we never need to worry about that.
Why reinvent the wheel?

The only reasons I can imagine a Pale Moon user rejecting Flash proper would be incompatibilities caused by underlying dependency changes, as has apparently happened in some recent Linux versions, or an ideological opposition to closed-source software which would probably also rule out using Pale Moon unless built manually. To bring these subjects back together, I wonder how long it will be before Windows 11 casually breaks Flash support like in the first scenario. The continued Chinese development for Windows suggests this should not be for a while, Then again, one could imagine it being done deliberately.

[Moonchild]

an ideological opposition to closed-source software which would probably also rule out using Pale Moon unless built manually.

Hate to disappoint people falling into that category, but we're building an application, not publishing an ideology. If someone has trouble with pragmatism of an application not aligning with their ideological approach to computing, then that is primarily a "them" problem. It's a self-imposed limit.

[ron_1]

If only Adobe had made Flash's code open source. I'm mean it's not like they're doing anything with it right now, so why not?

[Moonchild]

Adobe being Adobe, though...

[moonbat]

Since this keeps getting asked,the last fully functional Flash version that isn't time-bombed to disable itself is 32.0.0.371 and available to download here.

[moonbat]

If only Adobe had made Flash's code open source. I'm mean it's not like they're doing anything with it right now, so why not?

Adobe being Adobe, though...

Less to do with corporate behavior, more with IP law. There's probably a ton of legacy stuff in there (the original product was by Macromedia, which Adobe acquired in 2007) so who knows what kind of software patents or other licensing issues might have to be resolved before releasing it, and that also costs money to do. Not worth it for them when they've officially retired the product. But putting in that time bomb was a total dick move. Can't let people choose to use it and take on the responsibility of any security breaches themselves after all.

[Mæstro]

Is anyone clearer as to why NPAPI came to be identified only with Flash before the major browsers restricted support just to it? As long as i was on Windows 7, I used Java, Shockwave, Sumatra PDF (replacing Acrobat) and VLC (replacing Windows Media Player). I never used Silverlight myself, but I know of its reputation. The decline in broader plug-in usage presumably preceded the browser changes, unless deprecating NPAPI was entirely just another of Google’s follies, which would not surprise me at all if so.

There's probably a ton of legacy stuff in there (the original product was by Macromedia, which Adobe acquired in 2007) so who knows what kind of software patents or other licensing issues might have to be resolved before releasing it, and that also costs money to do.

This is why Microsoft has liberated only selected versions of MS-DOS, despite the fact that FreeDOS’s existence for decades has made the deed purely of historical interest. One can only hope that the source code will survive into next century, when the USA’s 95-year cap on copyrights will free them.

[moonbat]

Youtube had a Flash player in the late 00s. By then the only use for Flash was for playing streaming video. Embedded Youtube had killed off the use case of directly embedded videos that would require a VLC or other dedicated video NPAPI plugin. Flash based websites and website navigation had gone out of fashion in response to critique about their being un indexable by search engines and not supporting accessibility. What little was left for document viewing (again mostly PDF) was replaced by PDF.js. And Flash games while popular in the late 90s/early 00s had also mostly stopped being developed.
So the idea that HTML5 video would replace the need for Flash video playback got extended to getting rid of NPAPI altogether - as though Flash was the only reason to use it.