The web would not be what it is today without the Adobe Flash Player but the Internet’s reliance on Flash makes it difficult to operate when your web browser doesn’t have the necessary plugins. That’s something that Mozilla wants to fix with a new project called Shumway that will enable users to use Flash even when they don’t have the necessary plugins installed on Firefox.
Through a Firefox project called Shumway, Mozilla on Thursday took an important early step toward building a Web that works without Adobe Systems’ Flash Player. Flash spread widely more than a decade ago so website developers could embrace games, streaming video, animation, graphics and other features that were hard or impossible with a regular browser. Such browser plugins now are on their way out, with Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs banishing them from the iPhone, YouTube moving to the HTML standard, and Microsoft calling them a relic. But there is still plenty of Flash used in the real world, so Mozilla’s Shumway is designed to keep Flash-infused websites from breaking even when Firefox doesn’t have Flash.