Changes

:''Pretty much all of the HTML5 players implementations 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; these players . They are therefore really not intended for personal use, although it's usually not impossible.''

:The proprietary reference implementation, which Adobe stopped directly supporting in at the end of 2020. The web version relies on [[wikipedia:NPAPI|NPAPI/PPAPI]], an obsolete browser plugin system that for many years only stuck around specifically because of Flash Player; as Adobe was phasing out the plugin, so too was the plugin system gradually being dropped by all the major browser vendors. 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 payware HTML5 proprietary software package which basically just takes designed to make the Harman version of Flash Player and uses usable in modern web browsers by running it inside CheerpX, an a payware x86 emulator in WebAssembly, to make it run in modern browsers. No-one on this wiki has had the chance to properly evaluate it, but we'd expect reference-level accuracy at the cost of woeful performance. That being said, CheerpX apparently has an alternate mode of operation that offloads most of the emulation and processing work to an external a serverapp, at which point the HTML5 in-browser part is effectively just a remote client.

:A Rust implementation that mainly targets HTML5, but is also available as a desktop player. Notably being 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 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]. Notably, unlike Unlike the other HTML5 options, Ruffle can actually be installed as a browser addon, although sometimes with the caveat that a website will still load its own 's hosted copy will usually override the addon even if the addon version site is more recentrunning an older build.

:A C++ implementation that's designed specifically to provide drop-in FLOSS replacements for both the desktop and NPAPI versions of Flash Player. Says it has It claims to have 79% of the APIs covered , as of January 2022.

:An open-core HTML5 implementation 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. Uses Built on more "traditional" JavaScript rather code, so it pretty much always performs worse than the WebAssembly-based options, sometimes noticeably so performance is less than ideal.

:A desktop-only C++ implementation that went inactive in 2017, with the most recent stable release dating back to 2012. It focuses on older versions of Flash that Lightspark was historically less focused on supporting properly, hence why Lightspark could (and still can) use Gnash as an automatic fallback if both are installed simultaneously. However, newer versions of Lightspark have all but completely pretty much superseded Gnash entirely and there's not much reason to use it at all anymore.

::The original basis for Gnash. An ''extremely'' old C++ implementation, definitely one of the first serious efforts to reverse-engineer Flash Player into an open-source package. It hasn't been updated at all Inactive since 2009.