shumway

Shumway was a Mozilla research project that tried to play Flash files inside a web browser using only standard web technologies, with no plugins or native code required. Flash was a format used for animations, games, and interactive content on the web for many years. The goal of Shumway was to parse and render the SWF file format, which is what Flash content is stored in, entirely through JavaScript and HTML5.

The project was community-driven and backed by Mozilla. At the time of its active development, it shipped as a Firefox extension that users could install to test it against Flash content they encountered on the web. The extension was updated automatically on every code merge, so testers always had the latest version. Mozilla noted that full integration into Firefox was a possibility if the experiment proved out.

Contributing was straightforward: install the extension, try it on Flash files, and file issues for anything that broke or was not yet implemented. The codebase also had TODO comments throughout that served as a built-in task list for developers who wanted to jump in. The project used a mailing list and an IRC channel for discussion. The repository has been inactive for some time, as Flash itself was officially discontinued industry-wide in 2020.