I've seen this before, going all the way back to Gnu Gnash all the way up to Shumway (which was functional in the same way all the others were). The simple parts, typically the things from the AS1/AS2 world, are simple. As you get into the AS3 world there's a drop-off. I don't see anything in this project that hasn't been done before.
I am not aware of the folks behind Gnash, and Mozilla obviously cares about the web, but I don't think either of those organizations have the dedication to Flash that Newgrounds, or even the NYT, have.
Indeed. I was tracking a lot of these projects a few years ago because we had a Flex/AS3 RIA (remember that term?) so I was hoping we'd get a freebie port to HTML/JS.
In the end, we ended up writing our own AS3->JavaScript transpiler[1]. The Apache Flex project has since done something similar, though by the time that was done, we were done. So my skepticism stemmed from just seeing these projects come out, get some quick wins from implementing a simple subset of swf, and then just go nowhere.
But I wish them well. I hope it works out.
[1]Well, not totally ours. We used the existing Falcon compiler front-end and we wrote the emitter to transpile to TypeScript (after implementing a subset of Flash SDK that we needed).
