[7] Originating with FutureWave Software, then transferred to Macromedia, and then coming under the control of Adobe, SWF files can contain animations or applets of varying degrees of interactivity and function.

[8] This usage was changed to the backronym Small Web Format to eliminate confusion with a different technology, Shockwave, from which SWF derived.

[13] The idea involved a format which player software could run on any system and which would work with slower network connections.

As Flash became more popular than Shockwave itself, this branding decision became more of a liability, so the format started to be referred to as simply SWF.

[14] On May 1, 2008, Adobe dropped its licensing restrictions on the SWF format specifications, as part of the Open Screen Project.

However, Rob Savoye, a member of the Gnash development team, has pointed to some parts of the Flash format which remain closed.

[15] On July 1, 2008, Adobe released code to Google and Yahoo, which allowed their search engines to crawl and index SWF files.

[17] The binary stream format SWF uses is fairly similar to QuickTime atoms, with a tag, length and payload – an organization that makes it very easy for (older) players to skip contents they don't support.

Scaleform GFx is a commercial alternative SWF player that features full hardware acceleration using the GPU and has high conformance up to Flash 8 and AS2.

[32] Based on an independent study conducted by Millward Brown and published by Adobe, in 2010, over 99% of desktop web browsers in the "mature markets" (defined as United States, Canada, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand) had a SWF plugin installed, with around 90% having the latest version of the Flash Player.

[39] On that date, as part of its Open Screen Project, Adobe dropped all such restrictions on the SWF and FLV formats.

"[41] Other formats related to SWF authoring in the Adobe tool chain remain without a public specification.