"Ruffle project hopes to resurrect Flash Player" (in en). ↑ "Flash videos and games are resurrected by Ruffles emulator" (in en-US)."Flash is dead-but South Africa didn’t get the memo" (in en-us). Aside from the official website, this change was also soft announced via Strong Bad's Twitter account. Though certain elements of the website itself are currently unsupported by the emulator, most of the site's content has shifted to containment within a Ruffle window at the very least. Homestar Runner has also announced the implementation of Ruffle for their cartoons and games. In December 2020, Armor Games announced that Ruffle had been chosen as their player for Flash content.
Jason Scott, an archivist at the Internet Archive, said: "I looked into adding it to the Internet Archive system, and it took less than a day and a half because it was so well made." In November 2020, Internet Archive announced they will be using Ruffle to preserve Flash games and animations. In June 2020, Coolmath Games announced that all its Flash games will now use Ruffle. Founder Tom Fulp told The Washington Post: "We've been integrating Ruffle with the site and so far, the majority of content from before 2007 is running with Ruffle." The switch allowed Newgrounds to offer some touch-friendly games on mobile for the first time. In 2019, Newgrounds announced it was sponsoring the development of Ruffle, and would use it for all Flash content, starting with animations and later interactive games. Newgrounds founder Tom Fulp said they realized "the end of Flash was coming" in 2010, but did not know when. Websites using Ruffleīetween 20, some websites announced they would be using Ruffle. Later renamed Ruffle, this project would morph into a Flash Player emulator written in Rust, with a desktop and web client. In 2016, Welsh began a project called Fluster. Mike Welsh, who worked at Newgrounds until 2012, previously worked on an open source project named Swivel to archive Flash content into videos. Various websites, including governmental and educational ones, were not prepared for the shutoff and stopped working. Īdobe started blocking the use of Flash Player on Januusing a kill switch. That same year The New York Times began working on archiving old web content so readers could view webpages as they were originally published, and now uses Ruffle for old Flash content. Bleeping Computer reported that all the SWF games they tried in February 2021 "worked flawlessly." History BackgroundĪdobe announced in 2017 that it would stop supporting Flash Player on January 1, 2021, encouraging the use of HTML5 instead. ActionScript 3.0 support is at 10% of the language and 5% of the API. Downloads are available for Windows, macOS and Linux.Īs of December 2021, Ruffle primarily supports older Flash content, which uses ActionScript 1.0 and 2.0 with 85% of the language and 50% of the API implemented.
The desktop client uses a command-line interface to open SWF files, with a full graphical user interface planned for the future.
The Rust language itself prevents against common memory safety issues that Flash Player suffered from, such as use after free or buffer overflows. The web client relies on Rust being compiled to WebAssembly, which allows it to run inside a sandbox, a significant improvement compared to Flash Player, which had a significant amount of security issues.
Website authors can load Ruffle using JavaScript or users can install a browser extension that works on any website. Ruffle is written in the Rust programming language, featuring a desktop client and a web client.