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Comment by Jasper_ | Hacker News Reader

First of all, good old backwards compatibility. There's large codebases still written in Flash, or perhaps things that are in Flash that will never get updated ever again (browser games being a big one), and people would like them to work even after Adobe's dropped out.

It also turns out that reimplementing Flash in HTML5 gives you a great idea of what's missing if you want to tell developers to just use HTML5. There has been quite a lot missing from the web standards that Shumway helped pushed through.

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> First of all, good old backwards compatibility. There's large codebases still written in Flash, or perhaps things that are in Flash that will never get updated ever again (browser games being a big one), and people would like them to work even after Adobe's dropped out.

It's a fair point that wanting to retain the ability to run this content after there is no (working) Adobe plugin is desirable, but is the browser the best place for this? We don't demand that each version of an operating system is able to run all old application software for that OS; the preferred way of being able to do this is through virtualisation, and I'd argue that's probably a better way to do this, too.

> There has been quite a lot missing from the web standards that Shumway helped pushed through.

…such as? (I'm genuinely interested; I wasn't aware of this)

A big one that's being discussed right now is blend modes and filter effects on canvas, as we can't do a GPU blur or convolution filter on canvas contents right now. We're looking to see if it's possible to reuse some of the stuff like CSS filter effects on canvas 2D contents.

We've also helped with a lot of the baggage around audio decoding and synchronization, since Flash files can have MP3 files that require close sync to the timeline, so we need to use <audio> together with WebAudio, which is a giant bag of worms. We're still working through that on the web audio mailing list.

And we've also helped with some minor additions to the spec that aren't really too hard to implement, like canvas's isPointInStroke().

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