Mozilla have merged their Opensource Flash/SWF player 'Shumway' in the latest nightly builds of Firefox web browser. Mozilla's Shumway is an open web-native SWF (Adobe flash) runtime environment with the goal of making Flash more open & exploiting it further to provide support for SWF format which is used in many websites & particularly for smartphones where Adobe Flash player is not supported. Shumway Flash/SWF player is capable of handling many Flash-based applications but not many commercial applications, which could be the one major reason why Mozilla didn't enabled Shumway as 'default' right now in latest nightly build of Firefox.


Adobe flash player is said to be malware as it includes DRM & surveillance features where one site is able to write data in flash player & at the same time another site can interrogate with flash player which allows the websites to cross identify the user. While Google Chrome uses pepper-flash which comes by default enabling user to view flash websites, applications & videos without installing flash player additionally, Mozilla have taken similar step but by taking security concern in mind.

Source : gemal.dk - HTML5 Flash Player (Shumway ) landed