Mozilla publicly announces the open-source Flash-renderer Mozilla-sponsored Shumway project

As we have witnessed (in the latest months), Adobe Flash Player's fate on Ubuntu (and Linux) is uncertain, uncertain in the sense that the widely used tool/format will not receive major new features, while Adobe will continue to provide security updates to Flash on Linux 11.2 for five years.

Nevertheless, "Because of this work, Adobe has been able to partner with Google in providing a “Pepper” implementation of Flash Player for all x86/64 platforms supported by the Google Chrome browser".

Shumway is an "experimental web-native runtime implementation of the SWF file format", project developed as free and open-source.

The Mozilla-sponsored Shumway bears two main goals: offering a runtime processor for the SWF file format and other rich media formats ("on platforms for which runtime implementations are not available"), as well as pushing the open-source web platform towards properly handling previously-handled-by-proprietary-platforms-only web formats.

Basically, Shumway is a HTML5 standalone (no additional native code needed) technology that displays (work in progress) Flash content (SWF).

Yesterday, November 12th 2012, Mozilla has publicly announced the Shumway project, publicly embracing the exciting open-source Shumway technology (bearing a definitely serious potential).

Furthermore, for interested testers, a Shumway extension/add-on can be downloaded and installed/tested under Firefox BETA (in order to install it, click on the mentioned download link, while under a Firefox BETA build).

In-depth informations are available on https://github.com/mozilla/shumway/wiki