Changes

|[https://github.com/vidkidz/waflash WAFlash]Ruffle

|[https://clubpenguinadvanced.github.iocom/waflashruffle-demo/ Web]|{{✗}} ||{{✗}} ||{{✓}}|-|Ruffle|[https:/rs/ruffle.rs/demo Web demogit]

|[https://github.com/awayfl/awayfl-player git]<br />[https://exponenta.games/games/AFL/ Web demo]

|[https://github.com/swf2js/swf2js Download (Free Version only)]<br />Demo sites:<br />[https://swf2js0.com/free/index7.html Free Version]<br />[https://swf2js.com/prod/index.html Production Version8]

;Ruffle<small> ([https://ruffle.rs/demo/ web demo])</small>:A Rust implementation -based player that targets both HTML5 and desktop. Notably used by a bunch of veteran Flash content sites including [https://www.newgrounds.com Newgrounds], [https://homestarrunner.com Homestar Runner] and [https://www.coolmathgames.com CoolMathGames], and also by the Internet Archive's [https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_flash Flash library]. It's By 2021, it had progressed to the point where it can run many early Flash games, including the original Flash version of [https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/59593/format/flash?emulate=flash Alien Hominid]; support for newer AVM2-based files is now underway, although still far from complete. Unlike the other HTML5 options, Ruffle can actually be installed as a browser addon, with the caveat that a website's hosted copy will usually override the addon even if the site is running an older build.

You may also notice that a lot of older Flash player projects specifically fizzled out around 2009-20122010. That's in huge part because before then, many video hosting sites actually needed some type of SWF element to be able play videos in a browser, and the development of open-source alternatives was motivated by a combination of free software advocates people not wanting an increasingly large part of the Internet to hinge on a single proprietary software platform, and along with Macromedia/Adobe not necessarily seeing Linux support as a top priority. It wasn't until the start of 2010 that YouTube in particular started pushing really hard for HTML5 media elements, which have since become a standard feature in modern browsers and single-handedly made Flash Player completely redundant for multimedia playback.

:The proprietary reference implementationplayer, which Adobe stopped directly supporting at the end of 2020. The plugin version has been delisted from Adobe's website and also has a built-in kill-switch that was flipped in January 2021, so it's probably not much use even in browsers that still support NPAPI. However, the discontinued desktop player version is still available for download from the debug downloads section of Adobe's website, and Harman International is also [https://airsdk.harman.com/flashplayer maintaining an extended support version specifically for enterprise users].

:A C++ implementation player that's designed specifically to provide drop-in FLOSS replacements for both the desktop and NPAPI versions of Flash Player. It claims to have 83% of the overall SWF spec covered, as of August 2022, but development has been fairly slow since 2015 when it became a mostly one-person effort. Lightspark historically focused on more recent versions of the SWF spec that weren't supported by Gnash, hence why Lightspark could (and still can) use Gnash as an automatic fallback if both are installed simultaneously.

:A desktop-only C++ implementation player that went inactive in 2017, with the most recent stable release dating back to 2012. Probably not much reason to use it over newer versions of Lightspark, which seem to have mostly (if not entirely) superseded Gnash for compatibility.

:An ''extremely'' old C++ implementationplayer, definitely one of the first serious efforts to reverse-engineer Flash Player into an open-source package. Inactive since 2009, though it did lay the foundations for Gnash.

Pretty much all of the implementations players listed here are specifically designed to be used as [[wikipedia:Polyfill (programming)|polyfills]] by webmasters who want to keep their Flash-based sites going despite the forced obsolescence of Adobe's in-browser Flash plugin. They are therefore largely not intended for personal use, although it's usually not impossible and some of them even have official demo pages that you can use to load whatever SWF file you want.

;AwayFL<small> ([https://exponenta.games/games/AFL/ web demo])</small>:Developed by the Away Foundation, this is arguably the most direct alternative to Ruffle, and which it sometimes ''does's roughly even with in terms of compatibility although there are still a bunch of SWFs that' ll work better depending on fine in one but not the specific SWF file you're trying to runother.

;WAFlash<small> ([https://clubpenguinadvanced.github.io/waflash-demo/ web demo])</small>:An inactive, closed-source C++-to-WebAssembly implementation player that technically hasn't been made available to outside users, although there are a few sites where you can use it. It was considered the most accurate of the unofficial Flash players as of late 2021, although other still-active projects have caught up significantly.

;swf2js<small> (web demos: [https://swf2js.com/free/index.html free], [https://swf2js.com/prod/index.html production])</small>:An open-core implementation player that uses a dynamic recompiler. The source-available "Free" version supports limited features, such as AS1, AS2 and ZLIB compression, whereas the payware "Production" version is better suited to newer Flash files using such features as AS3 and LZMA compression. Built on more traditional JavaScript code, so it pretty much always performs worse than the WebAssembly-based options, sometimes noticeably so.

:A relatively very early implementationHTML5 player, developed rather actively under Mozilla sponsorship between 2012 and 2016 but ultimately abandoned before it could reach a usable beta state.