Introducing Quar Animator: Free 2D Animation That Runs in Your Browser

Adobe has stopped adding features to Animate. We're building the 2D animation tool we wanted instead — free, open source, and running in a browser tab.

Most of what we write here is about taking software apart: Windows internals, attack surface, the details that decide whether an engagement succeeds. But half of what we do is building software, and a good part of that is the modern web front-end — including graphics-heavy and 3D work in the browser. Quar Animator is the biggest thing we've built in that half, and today it's live at animator.quar.pro.

In February 2026 Adobe announced the end of Animate, the tool that grew out of Flash and has been the default for 2D vector animation for a generation. Two days later, after a lot of upset users, they walked it back. Animate now stays in maintenance mode: security and bug fixes, but no new features. If you make 2D animation for a living, that's an uncomfortable place to stand. The tool your pipeline depends on still works, but nobody is building its future, and the decision to change that is somebody else's.

We think 2D animation deserves a tool that is actively built, that you can open in a browser, and whose source you can read. So we're building one.

What it is

Quar Animator is a complete 2D vector animation editor that runs entirely in your browser. There's nothing to install and no account to create. Open the page, click New Project, and draw. It renders with WebGL 2, so playback stays smooth on an ordinary laptop, and it's built keyboard-first for people who spend all day in it: V for selection, P for the Pen, Space to play.

It's part of the QUAR suite, alongside QUAR Editor for 3D and QUAR ARTIST.

What you can make with it

Draw.

• Shapes and paths: the Pen, a pressure-sensitive brush, and rectangles, ellipses, polygons and stars.
• Path editing that holds up to real use:
  • Bend a segment by dragging it.
  • Join, cut, reverse and simplify paths.
  • Snap points as you work.
  • Combine shapes with boolean union, subtract, intersect and exclude.
• Fills and strokes: solid, linear, radial and conic gradients.
• Text in Figma-style text boxes. It comes with the Inter font, and Google Fonts are one click away.
• Imports: SVG files (including Figma exports, gradients intact) and images.
• Structure:
  • Reusable symbols with instances.
  • Masks (clip, alpha and luminance).
  • Artboards.
  • Several pages in one project.

Animate.

• Timeline and keyframes: a dope sheet with a graph editor for the curves between keyframes.
• Easing: thirty easing functions, plus custom béziers and springs.
• Onion skinning.
• Shape tweens that morph one outline into another, holes included.
• One-click presets: fade, rise, bounce, wobble and more.
• Animation Sequence: a PowerPoint-style list of numbered steps, each running after or with the one before. It's the fastest way we know to choreograph a dozen objects without touching a keyframe.

Rig.

• Bones with inverse kinematics.
• Weight painting.
• Bending: shapes and images bound to bones bend like meshes instead of moving rigidly.
• Smart Bones: reshape the artwork as a bone turns, such as an elbow that keeps its shape as the arm bends.
• Physics chains for hair, tails and anything else that should swing.
• Vitruvian Bones: switch a character between whole sets of bones, front view and side view say, with the artwork bound to each.

Seven tutorial projects come with the app. They're on the Projects page the first time you open it, and Help ▸ Restore Tutorials brings them back if you delete them.

Where your animation goes

An animation tool is only as good as what comes out of it, so we've put a lot of effort into export:

GIF and MP4 also have a playback speed control. Projects themselves save as .quar files you can download, back up and open anywhere.

Private by default

This is the part we care about most as a security company.

Quar Animator does its work on your machine:

• Your projects stay in your browser. They're saved in its local storage, not uploaded anywhere. There's no account, and the editor has no analytics.
• The only outside request is optional. Google Fonts, if you pick one, load only after you agree. The app tells you what that means: Google's servers will see your IP address. The bundled font needs nothing.
• Your clipboard stays local too. Copy and paste between two browser windows works, keyframes and rigging included, through your own system clipboard.

The trade-off is that a project lives in one browser on one machine. Clearing your site data clears your projects, so download a .quar copy of anything you'd hate to lose. That's the honest cost of having no server, and it brings us to the next part.

Two editions

Quar Animator, the one you can use today, is free and open source under the MIT licence, and it stays that way. Everything in this post is in it. It doesn't depend on any server of ours.

Alongside it, we're building a commercial edition: the same editor, with a backend and an MCP server.

• The backend adds accounts and cloud projects. Your work is saved on a server and available on any machine, instead of in one browser's storage.
• The MCP server lets AI assistants that speak the Model Context Protocol, such as Claude, work inside your projects. They'll be able to read a scene, make edits, and render a frame to check the result. The aim is real design and animation work, not just moving boxes around.

It's in development, and we'll write about it here when it's ready.

What it isn't (yet)

We'd rather tell you the limits than have you find them.

• It's young. This is version 0.1. It's capable, and we use it, but expect rough edges and things that change.
• It doesn't open Animate files. There's no .fla import, so bringing old work across means exporting it from Animate first, as SVG for artwork.
• Some things aren't built yet. WebM and SVG export are on the list but not in the app. There's no audio or lip sync yet, and no interactive state machines.
• It's a desktop tool. It needs a modern desktop browser with WebGL 2. A pen tablet works well, but it isn't designed for phones.

Under the hood

For the engineers reading:

• Code: a TypeScript monorepo, with React for the interface and a custom WebGL 2 renderer for the canvas.
• Animation and rigging: the animation engine, the rigging stack (inverse kinematics, mesh skinning and physics) and the exporters are separate packages.
• Tests: more than four thousand automated tests.
• Source: everything is on GitHub at FunwayHQ/quar-animator.

Getting started

Open animator.quar.pro, pick a tutorial from the Projects page, and press Space. If something breaks, or a feature you need is missing, Help ▸ Report Issues takes you straight to the issue tracker. Bug reports, feature requests and pull requests are all welcome.