Adobe’s Flash Player is without doubt one of the few plugins on the web that won’t be going anywhere anytime soon. HTML5 has certainly tried to dethrone the net video playback king, however it still lacks most of the features that make Flash so convenient. Which may not be the case sooner instead of later though if Mozilla has its way.

Ghacks reports that Mozilla, in its never ending quest to eradicate plugins from the net, has integrated Shumway into the newest version of Firefox Nightly. What’s Shumway, you ask? It’s an open source javascript-based SWF renderer. In other words, it’s Mozilla’s try to create a local Web technology which can do everything Flash does.

In a blog post from last year, Mozilla’s Jet Villegas said the Shumway project had two main goals:

1. Advance the open web platform to soundly process rich media formats that were previously only available in closed and proprietary implementations.

2. Offer a runtime processor for SWF and other rich media formats on platforms for which runtime implementations are usually not available.

Note that the blog from last year said that Shumway was still highly experimental, and was only available as an optional extension that the more adventurous among us should play with. Now it’s available in Firefox Nightly that is an indication that Mozilla is inching towards rolling it out to all Firefox users.

Despite that, it’s still going to be it slow before we see Shumway in Firefox Beta, or Aurora for that matter. In line with Infoworld, Shumway remains a great deal in its experimental phase. It could actually remain that way for a minimum of a number of more months, but its move to Nightly at the least signifies that Firefox wants more developers to assist test and refine it.

If you should help shape the way forward for a Flash-less Internet, try out Shumway’s Github page here. So that it will use it for yourself, you may grab Firefox Nightly here.

[Image: Wikimedia Commons]