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→Comparisons
===Comparisons===
====Hybrid====
;[[Ruffle]]<smallclass="plainlinks" style="font-weight:normal;"> ([https://ruffle.rs/demo/ web demo])</small><small class="plainlinks" style="font-weight:normal;"> ([https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle/issues/310 avm1 compatibility]) ([https://ruffle.rs/avm2.html avm2 compatibility])</small>
:A Rust-based player that targets both HTML5 and desktop. By early 2021, it had already reached the point where it could 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 as of December 2022. Unlike the other HTML5 options, Ruffle can be installed as a WebExtension in browsers that support it, with the caveat that a website's hosted copy will sometimes override the extension even if the site is running an older build.
:Ruffle has become hugely popular as an alternative SWF player, being 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 also the most actively developed and arguably the most accurate of the open-source players that are available today, so this is likely your next best option if you don't want to bother with Flash Player or anything that's been forked from it.
:A proprietary software package designed to make the Harman version of Flash Player usable in modern browsers by running it inside CheerpX, a payware x86 emulator in WebAssembly. 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 can also function as a streaming client to a bundled server app that does the emulation and processing work instead.
;AwayFL<smallclass="plainlinks" style="font-weight:normal;"> ([https://exponenta.games/games/AFL/ web demo])</small>
:Developed by the Away Foundation, this is arguably the most direct alternative to Ruffle, although it has fallen behind in terms of compatibility.
;WAFlash<smallclass="plainlinks" style="font-weight:normal;"> ([https://clubpenguinadvanced.github.io/waflash-demo/ web demo])</small>
:An inactive, closed-source C++-to-WebAssembly 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<smallclass="plainlinks" style="font-weight:normal;"> (web demos: [https://swf2js.com/free/index.html free], [https://swf2js.com/prod/index.html production])</small>
:An open-core player that uses a dynamic recompiler. The source-available "Free" version supports limited features, such as AS1, AS2 and ZLIB compression. In contrast, the payware "Production" version is better suited to newer Flash files using AS3 and LZMA compression features. Built on more traditional JavaScript code, so it pretty much always performs worse than any of the WebAssembly players, sometimes noticeably so.
