The other day we wrote that after Adobe disabled the Flash plugin, the Chinese started having problems. In particular, railway services in one of the cities have completely stopped working. Flash is used not only by railway workers, but also by other Chinese companies, enterprises and government agencies - schools, universities, etc.
In general, the Chinese have found an original solution - they decided to make their own Flash. And not even one technology, but two at once. So, the developers of the UOS distribution have created an alternative called ReFla, which, according to them, is doing well with its safety and stability. And an Adobe partner in China released the original Flash Player with security enhancements.
What about the alternatives?
As for ReFla, this technology is being developed by Union Tech, the creator of the state-owned Linux distribution Unity (Unity Operating System, UOS).
When development began is unclear, but most likely even before Adobe locked down its technology. Recall that this happened on January 12, 2021. But the company warned everyone ahead of time, announcing its intention to end support for Flash back in 2017.
ReFla is said to be Union Tech's proprietary technology. The company has not yet announced the differences with the original, but it proudly talks about the advantages over Flash. There are four of them:
- Stability.
- Security (no Flash-specific issues).
- Reduced consumption of system resources.
- Doesn't depend on US technology, it's the Chinese system.
And that's not all. The fact is that ReFla works not only on x86-compatible systems, but also on purely Chinese ones. Namely - those based on the Chinese architecture of Loongson. It is becoming more and more common in the Middle Kingdom - for example, the 3A4000 and 3B4000 chips are based on it. They are used in consumer electronics, servers and networking equipment.
And also - the original Flash, only better
As mentioned above, in the Celestial Empire, two alternatives are being prepared at once. The second is the original Flash, which was refined by the Chinese partner of the American Adobe, Zhong Orange Network. So, at the time of the end of support, the Flash player came with the index 32.0.0.465. But the Chinese have released Flash Player 34.0.0.92.
Other improvements include increased security and the same stability that the creators of ReFla talk about. An important point - Flash Player 34.0.0.92 was released before the end of support for its own technology by Adobe. Its release took place on January 12, 2021, just when an American company began to block the original player.
According to the creators of the updated player, it can work without problems on computers and laptops - both user and corporate.
No more alternatives?
Yes, only this is not a Chinese development. The Ruffle project is developed by enthusiasts, as you can imagine, it is a non-profit project. It is based on the Rust language, and you can use it both as a stand-alone program and as a plug-in installed using Webassembly. In general, this technology is an emulator of the original Flash player. Now the project code can be found on Github, published it under the terms of the Apache 2.0 and MIT licenses.
Despite the fact that the project is, one might say, a hobby, funds are allocated to it. First of all, this is The New York Times and the Newgrounds entertainment venue.
Unlike Chinese technology, the emulator has just begun to evolve. It currently only supports Flash content, which was launched before 2006. So there isn't much point in using Ruffle yet. The developers wrote that support for Action Script 1 and 2 languages is provided at 70%, and API - 35%. As for the third version, which appeared in 2009, it is not yet supported at all - about 5% of its capabilities have been implemented by force.
It is not yet clear when full support for all versions of Action Script will be implemented. It is probably easier to install the Chinese version of the player and not suffer.
Why such difficulties?
In China and many other countries, many technologies are tied to Flash, with which various services and sites have been integrated over the years. And when on January 12, 2021, Adobe began blocking Flash content across the global network, the schedule and booking system in the Chinese city crashed.
And if we consider that the population of this city is almost 5 million people, it becomes clear how problematic January 12 became for railway employees and passengers. And this is just one case that became known, and the mention of it was removed by the Chinese media shortly after publication.
There were probably other moments about which we simply do not know anything.
But the tax service of South Africa (South African Revenue Service, SARS) decided to create its own browser with Flash support. The problem is that the service's website is based on blocked technology, including a tax filing service. So if the work of these services stopped, the tax authorities would immediately have very serious problems.
It is difficult to call this a full-fledged browser, since it has only two functions, one of which is support for Flash, and the second is working with the website of the tax service. You cannot surf with this program, all other resources are not available in the browser.
This is a much less versatile option, because, unlike Chinese technologies, the "browser" can only work under Windows. It does not support Linux or Mac.
