Adobe's Flash remains a big part of our online lives despite its high requirements of processing power. But Mozilla is trying to move away from the Flash player plug-in for Firefox though project "Shumway". Project Shumway is a new technology Mozilla is developing that would allow Firefox to play back Flash media without the Flash plug-in. It has added in the cutting-edge version of Firefox -- the Firefox Nightly channel (desktop).

Currently, Shumway is enabled only for product tour videos on Amazon, only on Windows and OS X, and only in the Nightly version of Firefox, according to Mozilla programmer Chris peterson. But the Shumway team has been improving compatibility with Flash video players and will whitelist more Flash video sites soon, he added. Shumway needs H.264 video decoders that may not be available on Windows XP or Linux.

Flash plugins expand what Web browsers can do, but they also open up new security holes and crash problems. They also require large amount of processing resources to run.

Shumway itself uses those very standards. For example, it processes Flash programming instructions with its own JavaScript module. Mozilla plans to improve Shumway to take on more Flash duties, including Flash ads.