8 ms·

Firefox Nightly now plays Amazon.com Flash videos using Shumway

249 points by msujaws 12y ago

mburns 12y ago
> "Note that Shumway will not play Amazon's "Instant Video" films and TV shows. Those videos use Microsoft's Silverlight plugin for DRM."
- yohui 12y ago
  Amazon Instant Video can also use Flash. See "Player Preferences": https://smile.amazon.com/gp/video/settings https://smile.amazon.com/gp/video/settings
  - cpeterso 12y ago
    Thanks! I didn't know that. I just tested an Amazon Instant Video in Shumway, but the video fails to load because Amazon's video player uses some Flex libraries that Shumway doesn't support yet.
rcthompson 12y ago
> Shumway needs H.264 video decoders that may not be available on Windows XP or Linux. Today I learned that Firefox still supports Windows XP.
- cpeterso 12y ago
  About 25% of Firefox Windows users run Windows XP.
  - realusername 12y ago
    Yes exactly and from my experience it's really the best browser available on Windows XP. I've even seen myself a Windows XP with Firefox installed in a shop just a few days ago.
    - espadrine 12y ago
      Out of curiosity, what are the options on Windows XP? IE 8, Opera 12?
      - samuel 12y ago
        Chrome works fine, too.
      - cpeterso 12y ago
        In 2013, Google said they would support Chrome on Windows XP until at least April 2015: http://chrome.blogspot.com/2013/10/extending-chrome-support-for-xp-users.html http://chrome.blogspot.com/2013/10/extending-chrome-support-...
  - rplnt 12y ago
    Is that a real number? I've seen a huge decrease in Windows XP users over the last year, from almost 20% to bellow 10%. But that was for different product, so I'm wondering if FF got it this bad.
    - cpeterso 12y ago
      Yes, though I don't have a public source for it. I don't know why Firefox's OS version statistics are not public. Wikipedia says 49% of computers in China run Windows XP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP#Support_lifecycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP#Support_lifecycle Microsoft added its "Genuine Windows" copy protection in XP SP3, so XP SP2 is especially common. (Firefox supports both XP SP3 and SP2.)
      - yuhong 12y ago
        This is a myth actually, and I hope they can kill XP SP2 support in 2015. At least getting rid of the SHA1 cert at the download site at the end of 2015
bobajeff 12y ago
I'm waiting until they get JWPlayer working. So many sites still use it.
- cpeterso 12y ago
  JWPlayer support is difficult because there are many JWPlayer variants and old versions out there. It's easier to test and whitelist individual websites to start.
  - duskwuff 12y ago
    Why bother emulating it, though? If you can recognize it, and recognize that it's not using any unusual settings, you could potentially just replace the whole thing with a native video player.
    - cpeterso 12y ago
      That's a good question. Video is just one use case for Shumway. This specific use case might be better supported by rewriting Flash <object> tags with an HTML5 video player, but Mozilla dislikes adding hacks to workaround site-specific quirks. The hacks are technical debt carried by Firefox on behalf of websites that don't bother to maintain themselves. Mozilla even removes moz- prefixed DOM APIs and CSS attributes when the standardized, unprefixed name is supported.
      - Kliment 12y ago
        Sounds like a perfect use case for an addon then!
    - acdha 12y ago
      That might be a good pull-request for something like No Flash to test it on a larger scale: https://github.com/hfiguiere/no-flash https://github.com/hfiguiere/no-flash
cpeterso 12y ago
I'm a program manager on Mozilla's Shumway team. If you have any questions, please ask! :) The name "Shumway" is derived from "Gordon Shumway", the actual name of the TV character ALF: Flash -> Flash Gordon -> Gordon Shumway -> Shumway. :) Shumway is written in TypeScript. It has an ActionScript interpreter and a JIT that generates JavaScript, compiled using eval(). The code is on GitHub: https://github.com/mozilla/shumway/ https://github.com/mozilla/shumway/
- welly 12y ago
  Just to clarify, Shumway converts/interprets/executes Flash files as HTML/HTML5? That is very cool, if so.
  - dblohm7 12y ago
    That is correct.
  - niutech 12y ago
    Google Swiffy (https://www.google.com/doubleclick/studio/swiffy/ https://www.google.com/doubleclick/studio/swiffy/) does this too.
- torrance 12y ago
  Why Typescript, out of curiosity?
  - cpeterso 12y ago
    In part, the team just wanted to experiment with TypeScript. Also, the language is syntactically similar to AS3 so there is a close mapping from the AS3 library APIs to Shumway's TypeScript implementation.
    - _lce0 12y ago
      was there any pain point, at TypeScript side? what do the team think now about their initial decision giving TS a try?
JoshTriplett 12y ago
Sounds like Shumway is already further along than Gnash or Lightspark. What versions of SWF does Shumway aim to support? 7, 8, 9, 10, all of the above? How does Shumway interact with click-to-play and similar mechanisms to stop unwanted Flash objects from playing? Does it have that functionality built-in?
- edvinbesic 12y ago
  Considering this specifically states video and not flash in general I would imagine none of the above. Please correct me if i'm wrong though.
  - laumars 12y ago
    I think you've misunderstood the context of the title. It's in reference to a milestone being reached (ie Shumway now supports playing Amazon.com videos) rather than Shumway's end goal. From the discussion on HN, it sounds like Shumway aims to be a drop in replacement for Adobe's Flash plugin.
- cpeterso 12y ago
  Shumway is implementing APIs as needed, not targeting a specific SWF version. Shumway does not currently support click-to-play because it is not a real browser plugin. It hooks into Firefox's click-to-play mechanism to conditionally override the Flash plugin. This is a hack and will soon be replaced with "jsplugins", a Firefox feature that will allow browser plugins to be written in JS and run in an out-of-process sandbox: https://bugzil.la/jsplugins https://bugzil.la/jsplugins
  - sp332 12y ago
    Will this be more secure than Adobe's Flash, since that already runs in a separate process?
    - brohee 12y ago
      Since it won't be native code, they'll only be able to abuse a FF bug exposed by the JS plugin API, but should be in a very bad position to exploit a kernel bug... Same process isolation, but the JS plugin got a vastly reduced surface to attack.
snissn 12y ago
How do you go from swf files to "action script"? Do you use flasm/flare for as2? How do you turn as3 abc files into action script? Did you write your own decompiler or use some other open source ones? There's a disassembler written in D for as3 that I used to use called rabcdasm, did your team ever take a look at that?
- CyberShadow 12y ago
  > There's a disassembler written in D for as3 that I used to use called rabcdasm, did your team ever take a look at that? RABCDAsm author here. Curious about the same, I've always thought the project might be useful to VM implementers. Also wondering if you've had trouble with obfuscators that employ control flow obfuscation, and create unreachable basic blocks with junk code.
  - cpeterso 12y ago
    Yes, definitely! SWF obfuscators are a problem because they rely on undocumented behavior and implementation details of the Flash plugin that the Shumway developers must debug and support to maintain compatibility. Obfuscated AS1 code can do strange things like jumping to unaligned SWF addresses in the middle of bytecodes.
    - CyberShadow 12y ago
      > Obfuscated AS1 code can do strange things like jumping to unaligned SWF addresses in the middle of bytecodes. Oh, I've seen much worse. The AS1 VM actually treats the entire SWF file (after decompression) as an AS program. That means it's possible to jump outside of the bytecode tag and into e.g. the metadata of a JPEG file.
      - userbinator 12y ago
        Reminds me of one highly-regarded (at the time) obfuscator whose operation consisted entirely of renaming the existing bytecode tags to a reserved value, and adding a bytecode tag after it with lots of useless code including opaque predicates which eventually jumped out of the tag, backwards, into the original code. A bit of a letdown as I was looking for a challenge at the time, but that jump out of the tag was sure easy to detect and unobfuscate... (This is something that is still not fixed in Gnash, so Shumway is certainly farther along.)
rat87 12y ago
This is so cool, so more need to install hal?
endgame 12y ago
Cool tech, but I'm a bit sad that I can't watch Shumway[1] using Shumway. [1]: http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/shumway http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/shumway
- yellowapple 12y ago
  You actually can; I'm doing so right now. However, you need to install the full Shumway extension from http://www.areweflashyet.com/shumway/ http://www.areweflashyet.com/shumway/ (the stripped-down version shipping in Nightly is limited to Amazon only). If you use Shumway, though, don't forget to disable Adobe's Flash (I've found that having it enabled and Shumway installed results in rather brutal crashes).
  - tschneidereit 12y ago
    Can you give steps to reproduce this crash? It should definitely not happen. In fact, until https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=558184 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=558184 is implemented we rely on an installed Flash plugin to make the Flash detection used by most sites work.
    - yellowapple 12y ago
      Steps: 0) Have a Macbook Air running OS X Yosemite 1) Install Firefox 2) Install Adobe Flash 3) Install Nightly 4) Install Shumway 5) Attempt to open http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/shumway http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/shumway 6) Watch Firefox complain that the tab crashed 7) Try to reload the tab 8) GOTO 6 Disabling Flash (via the Addons screen in Firefox/Nightly) seems to fix the issue.
lewisl9029 12y ago
Only somewhat related, but is there still no way to access the clipboard in a web app without flash?
- skrowl 12y ago
  Imagine a web where you could just write to the users clipboard without a plugin + requiring a click. It would NEVER be safe to Ctrl+V again!
  - lewisl9029 12y ago
    The requiring a click part is the only relevant implementation detail for this functionality, in my opinion. Whether or not it requires a plugin shouldn't matter. In fact, requiring a plugin for this functionality only serves to increase the attack surface for the browser as a platform.
- RaleyField 12y ago
  Flash code can read clipboard from Flash/browser i.e. it can run in background and silently and continuously collect contents of clipboard? If so then it should be rightfully classified as spyware and purged from every computer.
  - cpeterso 12y ago
    I think Flash only allows SWF content to access the clipboard in response to a user click. GitHub's "copy repo URL to clipboard" button uses Flash to write to the clipboard. Shumway has implemented Flash's clipboard APIs (which it can do because it can access Gecko XPCOM APIs as a Firefox extension), but they are currently disabled because Shumway hasn't implemented the "in response to user click" bit yet.
- cpeterso 12y ago
  There is a W3C spec for a web clipboard API but I don't know if any browsers have implemented it: http://www.w3.org/TR/clipboard-apis/ http://www.w3.org/TR/clipboard-apis/
Torgo 12y ago
Does anyone have experience trying this with Firefox on PowerPC or ARMHF Linux? These platforms don't have any working Flash versions from Adobe...
- yellowapple 12y ago
  I'm wondering the same. I have a PowerBook G4 running OpenBSD 5.6 that I suppose I could test with, though Firefox has traditionally been pretty slow on that particular machine.
tux 12y ago
Tried it on Arch Linux + Firefox v35 works smoother than flash plugin. Used AUR package here: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/firefox-extension-shumway/ https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/firefox-extension-shumway... Can't wait for this to replace everything flash. Thank You, shumway team :-)
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- dblohm7 12y ago
  The single content process is an interim step until electrolysis development is further along.
maherbeg 12y ago
I'm one of the developers on the video player used on that page. Great work guys! Edit: I should add in, the player is primarily Javascript with a small rendering engine for Flash fallback. Even in the Flash case, everything is controlled via JS through a flash bridge. We prioritize HTML5 video when possible across browsers and devices.
- cpeterso 12y ago
  maherbeg: thanks! Our team was uncertain how to reach at Amazon to get your blessing. :) If you (or Amazon management :) have any problems or concerns, please feel free to email me at cpeterson at mozilla dot com! re HTML5 video: do you use it on desktop browsers? Mozilla is working hard to improve our HTML5 video implementation. Can we opt in Firefox for HTML5 video? Playing Flash videos in Shumway is just a stepping stone on the path to HTML5 video.
  - maherbeg 12y ago
    We do allow HTML5 video on Firefox for Windows. On Mac, we disallow it. We feature detect everything but have been prioritizing Flash at the moment due to issues with Chrome and HTML5 video.
    - cpeterso 12y ago
      > * We do allow HTML5 video on Firefox for Windows. On Mac, we disallow it.* Interesting. Is HTML5 video the default on Firefox for Windows or only used when Flash is not installed? (I only have a Mac.) Have you found specific Firefox problems with HTML5 video on Mac? Feel free to email me if you have questions for Firefox's video team about debugging or optimization. They are friendly folks. :)
maherbeg 12y ago
I just tested against Firefox Nightly on the amazon pages and it doesn't appear to be even loading the Flash renderer. We feature detect flash via the navigator.plugins object and from that thread it doesn't look like shumway is listed there. (I'm a dev on that player)
- tschneidereit 12y ago
  (Shumway tech lead here) Somewhat absurdly, you currently need Flash to use Flash without Flash in many cases. We don't yet have support for installing Shumway in navigator.plugins, so sites that detect Flash using that (i.e., most of them) currently only work in Shumway if Flash is installed, too. This will be fixed once https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=558184 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=558184 lands.
sunlight 12y ago
Verified@Twitter.com Bass word

249 points by msujaws 12y ago

> "Note that Shumway will not play Amazon's "Instant Video" films and TV shows. Those videos use Microsoft's Silverlight plugin for DRM."

yohui 12y ago
Amazon Instant Video can also use Flash. See "Player Preferences": https://smile.amazon.com/gp/video/settings https://smile.amazon.com/gp/video/settings
- cpeterso 12y ago
  Thanks! I didn't know that. I just tested an Amazon Instant Video in Shumway, but the video fails to load because Amazon's video player uses some Flex libraries that Shumway doesn't support yet.

rcthompson 12y ago

> Shumway needs H.264 video decoders that may not be available on Windows XP or Linux. Today I learned that Firefox still supports Windows XP.

cpeterso 12y ago
About 25% of Firefox Windows users run Windows XP.
- realusername 12y ago
  Yes exactly and from my experience it's really the best browser available on Windows XP. I've even seen myself a Windows XP with Firefox installed in a shop just a few days ago.
  - espadrine 12y ago
    Out of curiosity, what are the options on Windows XP? IE 8, Opera 12?
    - samuel 12y ago
      Chrome works fine, too.
    - cpeterso 12y ago
      In 2013, Google said they would support Chrome on Windows XP until at least April 2015: http://chrome.blogspot.com/2013/10/extending-chrome-support-for-xp-users.html http://chrome.blogspot.com/2013/10/extending-chrome-support-...
- rplnt 12y ago
  Is that a real number? I've seen a huge decrease in Windows XP users over the last year, from almost 20% to bellow 10%. But that was for different product, so I'm wondering if FF got it this bad.
  - cpeterso 12y ago
    Yes, though I don't have a public source for it. I don't know why Firefox's OS version statistics are not public. Wikipedia says 49% of computers in China run Windows XP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP#Support_lifecycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP#Support_lifecycle Microsoft added its "Genuine Windows" copy protection in XP SP3, so XP SP2 is especially common. (Firefox supports both XP SP3 and SP2.)
    - yuhong 12y ago
      This is a myth actually, and I hope they can kill XP SP2 support in 2015. At least getting rid of the SHA1 cert at the download site at the end of 2015

bobajeff 12y ago

I'm waiting until they get JWPlayer working. So many sites still use it.

cpeterso 12y ago
JWPlayer support is difficult because there are many JWPlayer variants and old versions out there. It's easier to test and whitelist individual websites to start.
- duskwuff 12y ago
  Why bother emulating it, though? If you can recognize it, and recognize that it's not using any unusual settings, you could potentially just replace the whole thing with a native video player.
  - cpeterso 12y ago
    That's a good question. Video is just one use case for Shumway. This specific use case might be better supported by rewriting Flash <object> tags with an HTML5 video player, but Mozilla dislikes adding hacks to workaround site-specific quirks. The hacks are technical debt carried by Firefox on behalf of websites that don't bother to maintain themselves. Mozilla even removes moz- prefixed DOM APIs and CSS attributes when the standardized, unprefixed name is supported.
    - Kliment 12y ago
      Sounds like a perfect use case for an addon then!
  - acdha 12y ago
    That might be a good pull-request for something like No Flash to test it on a larger scale: https://github.com/hfiguiere/no-flash https://github.com/hfiguiere/no-flash

cpeterso 12y ago

I'm a program manager on Mozilla's Shumway team. If you have any questions, please ask! :) The name "Shumway" is derived from "Gordon Shumway", the actual name of the TV character ALF: Flash -> Flash Gordon -> Gordon Shumway -> Shumway. :) Shumway is written in TypeScript. It has an ActionScript interpreter and a JIT that generates JavaScript, compiled using eval(). The code is on GitHub: https://github.com/mozilla/shumway/ https://github.com/mozilla/shumway/

welly 12y ago
Just to clarify, Shumway converts/interprets/executes Flash files as HTML/HTML5? That is very cool, if so.
- dblohm7 12y ago
  That is correct.
- niutech 12y ago
  Google Swiffy (https://www.google.com/doubleclick/studio/swiffy/ https://www.google.com/doubleclick/studio/swiffy/) does this too.
torrance 12y ago
Why Typescript, out of curiosity?
- cpeterso 12y ago
  In part, the team just wanted to experiment with TypeScript. Also, the language is syntactically similar to AS3 so there is a close mapping from the AS3 library APIs to Shumway's TypeScript implementation.
  - _lce0 12y ago
    was there any pain point, at TypeScript side? what do the team think now about their initial decision giving TS a try?

JoshTriplett 12y ago

Sounds like Shumway is already further along than Gnash or Lightspark. What versions of SWF does Shumway aim to support? 7, 8, 9, 10, all of the above? How does Shumway interact with click-to-play and similar mechanisms to stop unwanted Flash objects from playing? Does it have that functionality built-in?

edvinbesic 12y ago
Considering this specifically states video and not flash in general I would imagine none of the above. Please correct me if i'm wrong though.
- laumars 12y ago
  I think you've misunderstood the context of the title. It's in reference to a milestone being reached (ie Shumway now supports playing Amazon.com videos) rather than Shumway's end goal. From the discussion on HN, it sounds like Shumway aims to be a drop in replacement for Adobe's Flash plugin.
cpeterso 12y ago
Shumway is implementing APIs as needed, not targeting a specific SWF version. Shumway does not currently support click-to-play because it is not a real browser plugin. It hooks into Firefox's click-to-play mechanism to conditionally override the Flash plugin. This is a hack and will soon be replaced with "jsplugins", a Firefox feature that will allow browser plugins to be written in JS and run in an out-of-process sandbox: https://bugzil.la/jsplugins https://bugzil.la/jsplugins
- sp332 12y ago
  Will this be more secure than Adobe's Flash, since that already runs in a separate process?
  - brohee 12y ago
    Since it won't be native code, they'll only be able to abuse a FF bug exposed by the JS plugin API, but should be in a very bad position to exploit a kernel bug... Same process isolation, but the JS plugin got a vastly reduced surface to attack.

snissn 12y ago

How do you go from swf files to "action script"? Do you use flasm/flare for as2? How do you turn as3 abc files into action script? Did you write your own decompiler or use some other open source ones? There's a disassembler written in D for as3 that I used to use called rabcdasm, did your team ever take a look at that?

CyberShadow 12y ago
> There's a disassembler written in D for as3 that I used to use called rabcdasm, did your team ever take a look at that? RABCDAsm author here. Curious about the same, I've always thought the project might be useful to VM implementers. Also wondering if you've had trouble with obfuscators that employ control flow obfuscation, and create unreachable basic blocks with junk code.
- cpeterso 12y ago
  Yes, definitely! SWF obfuscators are a problem because they rely on undocumented behavior and implementation details of the Flash plugin that the Shumway developers must debug and support to maintain compatibility. Obfuscated AS1 code can do strange things like jumping to unaligned SWF addresses in the middle of bytecodes.
  - CyberShadow 12y ago
    > Obfuscated AS1 code can do strange things like jumping to unaligned SWF addresses in the middle of bytecodes. Oh, I've seen much worse. The AS1 VM actually treats the entire SWF file (after decompression) as an AS program. That means it's possible to jump outside of the bytecode tag and into e.g. the metadata of a JPEG file.
    - userbinator 12y ago
      Reminds me of one highly-regarded (at the time) obfuscator whose operation consisted entirely of renaming the existing bytecode tags to a reserved value, and adding a bytecode tag after it with lots of useless code including opaque predicates which eventually jumped out of the tag, backwards, into the original code. A bit of a letdown as I was looking for a challenge at the time, but that jump out of the tag was sure easy to detect and unobfuscate... (This is something that is still not fixed in Gnash, so Shumway is certainly farther along.)

rat87 12y ago

This is so cool, so more need to install hal?

endgame 12y ago

Cool tech, but I'm a bit sad that I can't watch Shumway[1] using Shumway. [1]: http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/shumway http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/shumway

yellowapple 12y ago
You actually can; I'm doing so right now. However, you need to install the full Shumway extension from http://www.areweflashyet.com/shumway/ http://www.areweflashyet.com/shumway/ (the stripped-down version shipping in Nightly is limited to Amazon only). If you use Shumway, though, don't forget to disable Adobe's Flash (I've found that having it enabled and Shumway installed results in rather brutal crashes).
- tschneidereit 12y ago
  Can you give steps to reproduce this crash? It should definitely not happen. In fact, until https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=558184 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=558184 is implemented we rely on an installed Flash plugin to make the Flash detection used by most sites work.
  - yellowapple 12y ago
    Steps: 0) Have a Macbook Air running OS X Yosemite 1) Install Firefox 2) Install Adobe Flash 3) Install Nightly 4) Install Shumway 5) Attempt to open http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/shumway http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/shumway 6) Watch Firefox complain that the tab crashed 7) Try to reload the tab 8) GOTO 6 Disabling Flash (via the Addons screen in Firefox/Nightly) seems to fix the issue.

lewisl9029 12y ago

Only somewhat related, but is there still no way to access the clipboard in a web app without flash?

skrowl 12y ago
Imagine a web where you could just write to the users clipboard without a plugin + requiring a click. It would NEVER be safe to Ctrl+V again!
- lewisl9029 12y ago
  The requiring a click part is the only relevant implementation detail for this functionality, in my opinion. Whether or not it requires a plugin shouldn't matter. In fact, requiring a plugin for this functionality only serves to increase the attack surface for the browser as a platform.
RaleyField 12y ago
Flash code can read clipboard from Flash/browser i.e. it can run in background and silently and continuously collect contents of clipboard? If so then it should be rightfully classified as spyware and purged from every computer.
- cpeterso 12y ago
  I think Flash only allows SWF content to access the clipboard in response to a user click. GitHub's "copy repo URL to clipboard" button uses Flash to write to the clipboard. Shumway has implemented Flash's clipboard APIs (which it can do because it can access Gecko XPCOM APIs as a Firefox extension), but they are currently disabled because Shumway hasn't implemented the "in response to user click" bit yet.
cpeterso 12y ago
There is a W3C spec for a web clipboard API but I don't know if any browsers have implemented it: http://www.w3.org/TR/clipboard-apis/ http://www.w3.org/TR/clipboard-apis/

Torgo 12y ago

Does anyone have experience trying this with Firefox on PowerPC or ARMHF Linux? These platforms don't have any working Flash versions from Adobe...

yellowapple 12y ago
I'm wondering the same. I have a PowerBook G4 running OpenBSD 5.6 that I suppose I could test with, though Firefox has traditionally been pretty slow on that particular machine.

tux 12y ago

Tried it on Arch Linux + Firefox v35 works smoother than flash plugin. Used AUR package here: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/firefox-extension-shumway/ https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/firefox-extension-shumway... Can't wait for this to replace everything flash. Thank You, shumway team :-)

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

dblohm7 12y ago
The single content process is an interim step until electrolysis development is further along.

maherbeg 12y ago

I'm one of the developers on the video player used on that page. Great work guys! Edit: I should add in, the player is primarily Javascript with a small rendering engine for Flash fallback. Even in the Flash case, everything is controlled via JS through a flash bridge. We prioritize HTML5 video when possible across browsers and devices.

cpeterso 12y ago
maherbeg: thanks! Our team was uncertain how to reach at Amazon to get your blessing. :) If you (or Amazon management :) have any problems or concerns, please feel free to email me at cpeterson at mozilla dot com! re HTML5 video: do you use it on desktop browsers? Mozilla is working hard to improve our HTML5 video implementation. Can we opt in Firefox for HTML5 video? Playing Flash videos in Shumway is just a stepping stone on the path to HTML5 video.
- maherbeg 12y ago
  We do allow HTML5 video on Firefox for Windows. On Mac, we disallow it. We feature detect everything but have been prioritizing Flash at the moment due to issues with Chrome and HTML5 video.
  - cpeterso 12y ago
    > * We do allow HTML5 video on Firefox for Windows. On Mac, we disallow it.* Interesting. Is HTML5 video the default on Firefox for Windows or only used when Flash is not installed? (I only have a Mac.) Have you found specific Firefox problems with HTML5 video on Mac? Feel free to email me if you have questions for Firefox's video team about debugging or optimization. They are friendly folks. :)

maherbeg 12y ago

I just tested against Firefox Nightly on the amazon pages and it doesn't appear to be even loading the Flash renderer. We feature detect flash via the navigator.plugins object and from that thread it doesn't look like shumway is listed there. (I'm a dev on that player)

tschneidereit 12y ago
(Shumway tech lead here) Somewhat absurdly, you currently need Flash to use Flash without Flash in many cases. We don't yet have support for installing Shumway in navigator.plugins, so sites that detect Flash using that (i.e., most of them) currently only work in Shumway if Flash is installed, too. This will be fixed once https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=558184 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=558184 lands.

sunlight 12y ago

Verified@Twitter.com Bass word