The death of Adobe Flash was long overdue. While 25-year-old technology helped bring animation, games, and interactive content to the web when she was still young, it has always been something of a security nightmare, with Adobe struggling to fix more bugs. quickly that vulnerabilities were discovered and exploited.
But now that Adobe has finally disconnected Flash, what happens to all the classic games and other content developed in Flash?
Some have been ported to newer web technologies like HTML5. Some live in the Internet Archive Flash Library. And there is BlueMaxima’s Flashpoint, a project to record over 70,000 Flash games and 8,000 animations and bundle them together with a “Flashpoint Secure Player”.
Now there is another option called ruffle. It is an open source Flash Play emulator designed to be more secure than the Adobe product, while still allowing you to run Flash games and animations on a wide range of devices.
Ruffle is written using the Rust programming language, which has built-in memory protection to help protect users from many vulnerabilities affecting Adobe’s Flash Player.
The Flash Player emulator is also cross-platform:
- You can install desktop apps for Windows, Mac, or Linux and load any SWF files you might have.
- Or you can install a browser extension for Firefox, Chrome, Edge, or Safari to play web games (this also works with mobile devices that support the extension, which means you can use Flash on Android )
- Or you can install Ruffle on your server to host flash games yourself in a sandbox environment on your own website.
Ruffle is still under development and a note on the project’s github page describes it as “in proof of concept”. But you can give it a try by visiting ruffle.rs/demo/ to play some sample games and animations in your browser.
via computer beep
Comments are closed.