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 Ruffle īetween 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. History Background Īdobe announced in 2017 that it would stop supporting Flash Player on January 1, 2021, encouraging the use of HTML5 instead. Bleeping Computer reported that all the SWF games they tried in February 2021 'worked flawlessly'. It also partially supports ActionScript 3.0 (support is at about 70% of the language and 61% of the API). Downloads are available for Windows, macOS and Linux.Īs of June 2023, Ruffle primarily supports older Flash content, which use ActionScript 1.0 and 2.0, with 95% of the language and 73% of the API having been 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 protects 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 multitude 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.

Ruffle is freely licensed and developed openly on GitHub.įollowing the deprecation and disabling of Adobe Flash Player, some websites adopted Ruffle so users could continue to view and interact with legacy Flash content.

Flash player online emulator