ruffle VS waterfox

https://ruffle.rs/ recently came to my attention when I needed to resuscitate a back into tool that had been completely built in Macromedia products

FWIW, the thing I've found as the slowest single factor on my machine, might not be the slowest on yours; I might have not noticed the real cause of slowdowns on your machine at all, and you may be the only one able to diagnose it.

(and for the record, I'm on W10 too.)

Also, my personal experience from optimizing https://ruffle.rs/ is that in many cases Firefox's wasm runtime can behave slightly faster than on Chrome for some reason; and performance issues are often instead caused by other APIs like the canvas.

The proprietary tools were only an issue for people who needed the timeline. Games-wise, Both Actionscript 2 and 3 were perfectly usable without Flash. The MTASC compiler was a massive game-changer, and then Adobe released the AS3 compiler themselves, and certainly when I was at a consultancy working on a massive, expensive game, none of us were authoring anything in Flash. Even the designers and artists simply provided image assets.

A few years later, I did use Flash to teach students interactivity (in 2016, I was wondering why myself, but hey, university courses are hardly up-to-date) but there was little other reason to use it.

Today, I still rate AS3 and if there was an LLVM project to output, I don't know, WASM, or similar, I'd try it. Oh, there are?

- https://github.com/bvibber/wasm2swf

- https://ruffle.rs/

Of course, MTASC wunderkind Nicolas Cannasse went off to create https://haxe.org/, which was used quite well on Smart TVs and the like for a while, still used in games. Maybe we already have the answer, but the web is too boring for this stuff.

How about the same old flash emulated in wasm, so no plugin.

https://ruffle.rs/

Use those same great adobe tools in a vm.

If it used Flash, Ruffle would've picked them up (great addon if you haven't heard of it already: https://ruffle.rs/)

Looks like this site uses Windows Media Player embeds to play WMV files. I don't know of any big addon that makes those types of embeds work, if the server for the embedded protocol is still even alive.

Thankfully, the videos have been mirrored to Youtube.

Looks like this uses Flash (SWF) for interactive diagrams. Luckily ruffle.rs [1] works.

[1] https://ruffle.rs/

Some of you may know ruffle (https://ruffle.rs).

The memories…

I often wondered what would happen to those wonderful Orisinal mini games after Flash's death, without actually checking out the site. Would Ferry Halim find the time to port them to "HTML5"? Would they just… disappear forever?

It turns out that they know run in Ruffle[1], a Rust/WASM based Flash Player emulator I've never heard of (or forgotten about). The handful of them that I have tested work flawlessly.

[1] https://ruffle.rs/

Firefox - Sadly, Firefox recently removed all mentions of "we do not sell your data" from their license, website, and legal docs. Which... means they sell your data. Sad times. But fortunately there is Waterfox. Been using it for a while and it's literally just "better Firefox". Doesn't spy on you or sell your data. Has better Tab UI customization. No built in "Try our Mozilla VPN" or any other product ads. Better default settings overall. It's just better.

I've switched to Waterfox (yet another Firefox fork) and so far I'm happy with that choice

https://www.waterfox.net/

If you think Librewolf is too opinionated, try Waterfox [1]

[1] https://github.com/BrowserWorks/Waterfox

This made me look into Firefox forks/alternatives:

Librewolf [1] seems to be fairly active (last commit on Codeberg was last week) and up-to-date with the latest upstream releases (mirrors FF's versioning scheme and matches their latest). Has a nice focus on privacy and no-telemetry.

Floorp [2] also looks active (last commit last week), also claims focus on privacy. Based off FF's extended support releases so it may lag behind in latest features.

Waterfox [3] is also active (last commit a few hours ago), also big focus on privacy, but it uses a custom versioning scheme so I can't tell how closely it follows FF's releases.

GNU IceCat's [4] latest release was in November 02023, so it looks like it may be abandoned.

Does anyone have any experience with any of these, good or bad? With all of them more or less promising the same things it's hard to tell which one may be the better option.

1: https://librewolf.net/

2: https://floorp.app/en

3: https://www.waterfox.net/

4: https://icecatbrowser.org/

Just installed Waterfox a couple hours ago. ( https://www.waterfox.net/ ) I'm getting fed up with all the latest Mozilla bullshit to the point I'm ready to switch browsers.

Ladybird is starting to look good too, from an end user daily driver perspective, technically it has been impressive for a long time.

I use a Azure Key Vault[1], and jsign[2] to do this.

You can execute it on any platform that supports Java, so I have Linux builds cross compiling to windows with clang and then sign with jsign: https://github.com/BrowserWorks/Waterfox/blob/7eda3b998a56ad...

[1] https://trustzone.com/knowledge-base/purchasing-an-ev-code-s...

This is Android-specific news.

Desktop users interested in a privacy-first Firefox should try Waterfox https://www.waterfox.net/