Donmai

Future of Flash?

Posted under General

I'm wondering if anyone has considered/discussed what will happen to the 1.2k Flash posts on this site after the end of the year.
All the major browsers are discontinuing Flash support at the end of 2020 (just one more thing this wonderful year stole from us) and I'm curious what the plan is going forward for the pages as they will be largely useless and unviewable on the site.

I apologize if the topic was covered but my search of the forum yielded no result and i'm curious as to how of if these pieces will be preserved in some way.

I think that over time the SWF display functionality will be replaced with a simple warning that format support is over. The download buttons will remain as they are now.
I consider it necessary to disable the ability to load swf so that someone does not baffle the reviewers and users with this format. Although the last download was a year ago, a stick shoots once a year.

There are a number of WASM Flash runtimes in development, which allow playback of SWFs in modern browsers.

A promising one is Ruffle.

Using it just requires including a javascript library and enabling the polyfill on the relevant pages.

A quick test (using their browser extension) shows that it already works with 8/10 flash files on the first page. Second page is worse, where only around half work. The situation is bound to improve as development continues.

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