Recently came across this project <https://ruffle.rs/> to implement a new player for Adobe’s ancient, obsolete Flash format. If you recall, Adobe’s Flash Player implementation (before it was discontinued) suffered from many problems, not least of which was the never-ending trickle of security vulnerabilities. However, this new player, called “Ruffle”, is written entirely from scratch in Rust, a language designed to automatically protect the programmer from many common memory-manipulation mistakes. The expectation is clearly that this will lead to far fewer security problems, as well as making the code easier to maintain. Ruffle can be built as a standalone player application, or as a JavaScript+WASM package that you can install on your website, or as a browser extension. That way, if you like to visit ancient web sites that still serve up .swf files in the expectation that you have Flash Player installed, you can install the browser extension to take the place of Flash Player. Or if you are a web admin who has animations in Flash format that you want to serve up to users without having to require them to install anything special, you can include the JavaScript+WASM package on your site, and have it automatically handle the playback in the user’s browser. GNU used to have a similar project called Gnash (predating Rust, just written in C and C++), which could be built as an old-style browser plugin, like Flash Player itself (no longer supported by current browsers), or as a standalone application. But it seems to have been abandoned. Will this project lead to a resurgence in the creation of animations in Flash format? I sincerely hope not ...