Adobe Flash is a multimedia software platform used for production of animations, rich web applications, desktop applications, mobile apps, mobile games, and embedded web browser video players. Flash displays text, vector graphics, and raster graphics to provide animations, video games, and applications. It allows streaming of audio and video, and can capture mouse, keyboard, microphone, and camera input.
In computing, a plug-in is a software component that adds a specific feature to an existing computer program. When a program supports plug-ins, it enables customization.
Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface (NPAPI) is an application programming interface (API) of the Web Browsers that allows plugins to be integrated.
OpenSearch is a collection of technologies that allow the publishing of search results in a format suitable for syndication and aggregation. Introduced in 2005, it is a way for websites and search engines to publish search results in a standard and accessible format.
Adobe Flash Player is computer software for content created on the Adobe Flash platform. Flash Player is capable of viewing multimedia contents, executing rich Internet applications, and streaming audio and video. In addition, Flash Player can run from a web browser as a browser plug-in or on supported mobile devices. Originally created by FutureWave under the name FutureSplash Player, it was renamed to Flash Player after Macromedia acquired FutureWave in 1996. It was then developed and distributed by Adobe Systems after Adobe acquired Macromedia in 2005. Currently, it's developed and distributed by Zhongcheng for users in China, and by Harman International for enterprise users outside of China, in collaboration with Adobe. Flash Player is distributed as freeware. With the exception of the China-specific and enterprise supported variants, Flash Player was discontinued on 31 December 2020, and its download page disappeared two days later. Since 12 January 2021, Flash Player versions newer than 32.0.0.371, released in May 2020, refuse to play Flash content and instead display a static warning message.
Gnash is a media player for playing SWF files. Gnash is available both as a standalone player for desktop computers and embedded devices, as well as a plugin for several browsers. It is part of the GNU Project and is a free and open-source alternative to Adobe Flash Player. It was developed from the gameswf project.
Aptana, Inc. is a company that makes web application development tools for use with a variety of programming languages. Aptana's main products include Aptana Studio, Aptana Cloud and Aptana Jaxer.
Tamarin is a discontinued free software virtual machine with just-in-time compilation (JIT) support intended to implement the 4th edition of the ECMAScript (ES4) language standard. Tamarin source code originates from ActionScript Virtual Machine 2 (AVM2) developed by Adobe Systems, as introduced within Adobe Flash Player 9, which implements ActionScript 3 scripting language. ActionScript Virtual Machine 2 was donated as open-source to Mozilla Foundation on November 7, 2006, to develop Tamarin as a high-performance virtual machine, with the support from broad Mozilla community, to be used by Mozilla and Adobe Systems in the next generation of their JavaScript and ActionScript engines with the ultimate aim to unify the scripting languages across web browsers and Adobe Flash platform and ease the development of rich better performing web applications.
Microsoft Silverlight is a discontinued application framework designed for writing and running rich web applications, similar to Adobe's runtime, Adobe Flash. A plugin for Silverlight is still available for a very small number of browsers. While early versions of Silverlight focused on streaming media, later versions supported multimedia, graphics, and animation, and gave support to developers for CLI languages and development tools. Silverlight was one of the two application development platforms for Windows Phone, but web pages using Silverlight did not run on the Windows Phone or Windows Mobile versions of Internet Explorer, as there was no Silverlight plugin for Internet Explorer on those platforms.
Firebug is a discontinued free and open-source web browser extension for Mozilla Firefox that facilitated the live debugging, editing, and monitoring of any website's CSS, HTML, DOM, XHR, and JavaScript. It is now inbuilt in Firefox.
Google Native Client (NaCl) is a sandboxing technology for running either a subset of Intel x86, ARM, or MIPS native code, or a portable executable, in a sandbox. It allows safely running native code from a web browser, independent of the user operating system, allowing web apps to run at near-native speeds, which aligns with Google's plans for Chrome OS. It may also be used for securing browser plugins, and parts of other applications or full applications such as ZeroVM.
FlashDevelop is an integrated development environment (IDE) for development of Adobe Flash websites, web applications, desktop applications and video games. The resulting applications run in Adobe Flash Player or Adobe AIR, on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Android or iOS. The primary purpose of FlashDevelop is enabling developers to edit, compile, debug and publish a Flash ActionScript project. It supports ActionScript 2.0, ActionScript 3.0, Haxe and other upcoming languages. It has code completion, syntax highlighting, snippets and other features similar to Microsoft Visual Studio.
Lightspark is a free and open-source SWF player released under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) version 3.
Modern HTML5 has feature-parity with Adobe Flash. Both include features for playing audio and video within web pages. Flash is specifically built to integrate vector graphics and light games in a web page, features that HTML5 also supports.
Adobe Wallaby is an application that turns FLA files into HTML5. On March 8, 2011, Adobe Systems released the first version of an experimental Flash to HTML5 converter, code named Wallaby. It has been quickly superseded by various other Adobe tools.
Google Swiffy was a web-based tool developed by Google that converted SWF files to HTML5. Its main goal was to display Flash contents on devices that do not support Flash, such as iPhone, iPad, and Android Tablets. Swiffy was shut down July 1, 2016.
Mozilla is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, spreads and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting exclusively free software and open standards, with only minor exceptions. The community is supported institutionally by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation and its tax-paying subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation.
PDF.js or pdf.js is a JavaScript library that renders Portable Document Format (PDF) files using the web standards-compliant HTML5 Canvas. The project is led by the Mozilla Corporation after Andreas Gal launched it in 2011.
CrossBridge is an open-source toolset developed by Adobe Systems, that cross-compiles C and C++ code to run in Adobe Flash Player or Adobe AIR. Projects compiled with CrossBridge run up to 10 times faster than ActionScript 3 projects. CrossBridge was also known as "Alchemy" and the "Flash Runtime C++ Compiler", or "FlasCC".
Ruffle is an emulator for SWF files. Following the deprecation and disabling of Adobe Flash Player, websites adopted Ruffle so users could continue to view and interact with legacy Flash content. Ruffle is freely licensed and developed openly on GitHub.
