It's been a very busy 2023 for Ruffle, so much so that we didn't find the time to write a new progress report with everything going on! Let's fix that!
People keep talking about preservation whenever Ruffle is brought up for some reason. Deprecated or not, the old Flash Player (which is still on Flathub) still works perfectly fine and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Flash games have never been in any immediate preservation danger. Ruffle is cool because it's more secure, it performs better and it works in modern web browsers. It's not really preserving anything.
It's the same concept as old DOS games. Sure you could install a super old version of windows but by giving a more accessible, secure, and free version, the games are essentially preserved from becoming totally abandoned.
Falkon. It's the only web browser I can think of that still has PPAPI. Maybe Konqueror and Angelfish also do? Would have to check. Either way, these browsers all kinda suck and obviously any browser you'd want to use has dropped support, as I already conceded. Ruffle works in most modern web browsers, Flash does not.
I just didn't really consider that necessary for strictly preservation purposes. All you need is an archive of SWF files you can download like flashpoint and software that can launch them. Flash Player and Ruffle are both perfectly suitable for this.
People keep talking about preservation whenever Ruffle is brought up for some reason. Deprecated or not, the old Flash Player (which is still on Flathub) still works perfectly fine and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Flash games have never been in any immediate preservation danger. Ruffle is cool because it's more secure, it performs better and it works in modern web browsers. It's not really preserving anything.
It's the same concept as old DOS games. Sure you could install a super old version of windows but by giving a more accessible, secure, and free version, the games are essentially preserved from becoming totally abandoned.
Which browser even supports installing flash player?
Falkon. It's the only web browser I can think of that still has PPAPI. Maybe Konqueror and Angelfish also do? Would have to check. Either way, these browsers all kinda suck and obviously any browser you'd want to use has dropped support, as I already conceded. Ruffle works in most modern web browsers, Flash does not.
I just didn't really consider that necessary for strictly preservation purposes. All you need is an archive of SWF files you can download like flashpoint and software that can launch them. Flash Player and Ruffle are both perfectly suitable for this.