Google Swiffy

» see developers.google.com/swiffy as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

I never owned a single SWF file. Everyone who was online between 2000 and 2010 spent an enormous amount of time inside Flash, on the game sites and the intro animations and the banner ads that moved, but almost none of us made any of it. Swiffy was a tool for the small number of people who had, and who by 2011 were being told that what they had made no longer ran on the device most people were holding.

Google put it out of Labs in June 2011. It had started that summer as a project by an engineering intern named Pieter Senster, which is a decent measure of how the problem was rated internally at the time: a real gap, worth one person's attention, not worth a team.

The problem itself was not subtle. The iPhone had shipped in 2007 with no Flash player and Apple never added one, and Adobe abandoned Flash Player for Android in 2011. If you had spent five years building a business on an animation format, you now had an archive that a growing majority of your audience could not open. Swiffy was the exit door for that archive.

It ran until 1 July 2016. Google gave notice on 15 June and pointed people at plain HTML5 instead. The runtime stayed up, so files that had already been through the converter did not break on the shutdown date. Only the door closed.

~ the case file ~

~ how it worked ~

You uploaded a SWF. A closed Google web service parsed it and produced an intermediate form serialized as JSON. That JSON came back to your browser, where a JavaScript runtime turned it into SVG and drove the animation from there. What you got out was a single HTML file that opened anywhere modern.

The interesting part is that Google never released the parser. The conversion happened on Google's machines and only Google's machines, which is why the shutdown was total rather than a matter of the source going unmaintained on a forgotten repository. Version 6.0.1 in February 2014 was the last meaningful update. It handled a subset of SWF 10 and both ActionScript 2.0 and 3.0, and the word subset is carrying real weight in that sentence.

~ the slide ~

Flash was not really an animation format by 2011. It was an application platform with a scripting language, a sound engine, video codecs and a security model, and no converter was ever going to bring all of that across into a document standard that had been designed for laying out text. Swiffy did banner ads and simple animations well. It did not do Flash games, and Flash games were most of what people actually wanted rescued.

That gap never closed, and it explains the shutdown better than declining usage does. The category of thing Swiffy could convert was advertising, and by 2016 the ad industry had simply stopped authoring in Flash. The category it could not convert was still stranded, and stayed stranded until Flashpoint and Ruffle came at the problem from the emulation side years later.

~ the long tail ~

Google keeping the runtime online past the shutdown is a small thing that most companies do not bother with. It means that a converted animation sitting on some agency's website in 2013 has kept working through the entire death of Flash, without anyone maintaining it and probably without anyone noticing.

Flash Player itself was switched off on 31 December 2020 and actively blocked from running in January 2021. Swiffy predeceased it by four and a half years, which is the natural order for an evacuation tool. You take the exit down after everyone who was going to leave has left.

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