Adobe Shockwave Player

Not to be confused with Adobe Flash Player.
Adobe Shockwave Player
Original author(s) Macromedia
Developer(s) Adobe Systems
Stable release 12.2.4.194 / 19 February 2016 (2016-02-19)[1]
Operating system Microsoft Windows, Mac OS 9, Mac OS X (Universal)
Platform Web browsers
Type Multimedia Player / MIME type: application/x-director
License Proprietary[2]
Website www.adobe.com/products/shockwaveplayer/

Adobe Shockwave Player (formerly Macromedia Shockwave Player) is a freeware software plug-in for viewing multimedia and video games in web pages, content created on the Adobe Shockwave platform. Content is developed with Adobe Director and published on the Internet. Such content can be viewed in a web browser on any computer with the Shockwave Player plug-in installed. It was first developed by Macromedia, and released in 1995 and was later acquired by Adobe Systems in 2005.[3]

Shockwave Player runs DCR files published by the Adobe Director environment. Shockwave Player supports raster graphics, basic vector graphics, 3D graphics, audio, and an embedded scripting language called Lingo.[4][5] Hundreds of free online video games were developed using Shockwave, and published on websites such as Miniclip and Shockwave.com.[6]

As of July 2011, a survey found that Flash Player had 99% market penetration in desktop browsers in "mature markets" (United States, Canada, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand), while Shockwave Player claimed only 41% in these markets.[7] As of 2015, Flash Player is a suitable alternative to Shockwave Player, with its 3D rendering capabilities and object-oriented programming language. Flash Player cannot display Shockwave content, and Shockwave Player cannot display Flash content.[8]

History

The Shockwave player was originally developed for the Netscape browser by Macromedia Director team members Harry Chesley, John Newlin, Sarah Allen, and Ken Day, influenced by a previous plug-in that Macromedia had created for Microsoft's Blackbird. Version 1.0 of Shockwave was released independent of Director 4 and its development schedule has since coincided with the release of Director since version 5. Its versioning also has since been tied to Director's and thus there were no Shockwave 2-4 releases.

Shockwave 1
The Shockwave plug-in for Netscape Navigator 2.0 was released in 1995, along with the standalone Afterburner utility to compress Director files for Shockwave playback. The first large-scale multimedia site to use Shockwave was Intel's 25th Anniversary of the Microprocessor.[9]
Shockwave 5
Afterburner is integrated into the Director 5.0 authoring tool as an Xtra.
Shockwave 6
Added support for Shockwave Audio (swa) which consisted of the emerging MP3 file format with some additional headers.
Shockwave 7
Added support for linked media including images and casts.
Added support for Shockwave Multiuser Server.
Shockwave 8.5
Added support for Intel's 3D technologies including rendering.
Shockwave 9
Shockwave 10
Last version to support Mac OS X 10.3 and lower, and Mac OS 9.
Shockwave 11
Added support for Intel-based Macs.
Shockwave 12
Shockwave 12.1
It is supported by 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows XP, Vista, 7, and 8. It has content made from previous versions as well as Director MX 2004. From version 12.1.5.155 Shockwave is supported in both Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox.[10]

Platform support

Shockwave is available as a plug-in for both Mac OS and Windows for most of its history. However, there was a notable break in support for the Macintosh between January 2006 (when Apple Inc. released Apple–Intel transition based on the Intel Core Duo) and March 2008 (when Adobe Systems released Shockwave 11, the first version to run natively on Intel Macs).

Unlike Flash Player, Shockwave Player is not at all available for Linux or Solaris despite intense lobbying efforts. However, the Shockwave Player can be installed on Linux with CrossOver or by running a Windows version of a supported browser in Wine (with varying degrees of success). It is also possible to use Shockwave in the native Linux version of FireFox by using the Pipelight plugin, which is based on a modified version of Wine.

Security

Some security experts advise users to uninstall Adobe Shockwave Player because "it bundles a component of Adobe Flash that is more than 15 months behind on security updates, and which can be used to backdoor virtually any computer running it", in the words of Brian Krebs. This opinion is based on research by Will Dormann, who goes on to say that Shockwave is architecturally flawed because it contains a separate version of the Flash runtime that is updated much less often than Flash itself.[11] Additionally Krebs writes that "Shockwave has several modules that don’t opt in to trivial exploit mitigation techniques built into Microsoft Windows, such as SafeSEH."[12][13]

Branding and name confusion

In an attempt to raise its brand profile, all Macromedia players prefixed Shockwave to their names in the late 1990s. Although this campaign was successful and helped establish Shockwave Flash as a multimedia plugin, Shockwave and Flash became more difficult to maintain as separate products. In 2005, Macromedia marketed three distinct browser player plugins under the brand names Macromedia Authorware, Macromedia Shockwave, and Macromedia Flash.

Macromedia also released a web browser plug-in for viewing Macromedia FreeHand files online. It was branded Macromedia Shockwave for FreeHand and displayed specially compressed .fhc Freehand files.[14]

Later, with the acquisition of Macromedia, Adobe Systems slowly began to rebrand all products related to Shockwave.

See also

References

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Monday, March 28, 2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.