@supercoder's point about skating where the puck used to be has truth in it, and we do not aim to over-invest in Flash via Shumway now (and we avoided it before; perhaps we should have done more, but the only temporarily-winning effort I know of was Chrome's, which required a business deal with Adobe and a tremendous amount of engineering effort on Google's side).

On the other hand, as Jet Villegas's blog post points out, we also uplift the web and smooth out uneven APIs and performance curves by researching Shumway. If Flash requires some greater JS performance, or some API gap to be filled, Shumway is the most direct way to find out. It's well within Mozilla Research's ambit, and not backward-looking, to explore this space.

Finally, if we can deploy Shumway as a previewer and reduce actual Flashplayer plugin instantiations greatly, with as good or better user experience in terms of jank, CPU utilization, battery life, etc. -- and with some black-video-frame-of-death saves on my iPad, should Shumway be supported there -- that helps in the coming years as Flash lingers on in the "desktop web".

But make no mistake: the growth curve for mobile devices and the lack of Flash there will kill Flash. All those restaurant sites that sunk their discretionary web content development budgets in Flash years ago? They are re-investing rapidly to work on iOS devices. I don't see Flash rallying on desktop, or even via Air on Android.

Add this all up and I believe Shumway can avoid the forever-a-toy status. Flash is proprietary tech, in spite of SWF being opened up in recent years. Its single main implementation code is its spec. This hurts when the single implementation is evolving rapidly, but as that implementation slows down and (outside of Air and games, let's say) declines, the 90%-coverage "toys" become real tools, with the right integration.

This could have applied to Gnash or swfdec in the past, but at significantly higher cost, not only in direct engineering costs and opportunity costs to web-perf/API-uplift, but also in securing yet more piles of native VM code.

/be