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Google's Amazing Browser Experiments
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Thu Mar 19, 2009 08:35 AM
from the yeah-its-that-kind-of-day dept.
from the yeah-its-that-kind-of-day dept.
Barence writes "On the day that Microsoft launches Internet Explorer 8, Google has unveiled a new site that showcases the Javascript performance of its Chrome browser. Called Chrome Experiments, the site includes 19 extraordinary animated games and widgets that push the browser to its limits. One experiment, called Browser Ball allows you to 'throw' a bouncing ball from one browser window to the next. Google Gravity, on the other hand, collapses the normal Google homepage into a pile at the bottom of the screen. However, you can still enter search terms into the box and watch the results drop from the top of the browser window."
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Obvious user question (Score:4, Funny)
Why does this frecking site do not work in ie6...
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Obvious user question (Score:5, Informative)
it is a "corporate policy" because most of the HR software works only in IE6, and the reason most of the HR software works only in IE6 is because the HR departments demand IE6 compatibility... get where this one is going?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Problem is that not even the end users are the problem anymore it is the corporations which probably will use ie until 2100...
Anyway the good news is, that the market share of this dreck is dropping at the same rate as ie5.5 used to drop when ie6 came out so expect in about 6-8 months the significance of ie6 down to levels where you can really start to ignore it!
The downside is, that most of those now migrating will migrate to ie7 which is also aweful... but at least css positioning works somewhat better, a
Re:Obvious user question (Score:5, Insightful)
... get where this one is going?
HR is full of morons? Seriously, on the corporate intelligence scale, people in HR rank only slightly above the people that sweep the floor.
Parent
Re:Obvious user question (Score:4, Insightful)
I beg to differ. Many people sweeping floors are very intelligent and educated, but through accidents of birth or geography have been forced to flee dangerous conditions in a 3rd world country. Since there is a failaure of western countries to recognize experience or academic credentials of foriegners, these people are forced into low level unskilled jobs to support themselves and their families.
In many cases the people sweeping the floors are more intelligent than the HR people.
Parent
Re:Obvious user question (Score:5, Funny)
In many cases the people sweeping the floors are more intelligent than the HR people.
Note to self:
The janitorial staff gets offended when you compare their intelligence to that of a person in human resources.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
people in HR rank only slightly above the people that sweep the floor.
With no exaggeration, I can say that the people who sweep the floor provide a much more useful service than most HR departments. I wouldn't impugn their intelligence (or species for that matter) by suggesting they are inferior to HR.
Re:Obvious user question (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Obvious user question (Score:4, Informative)
Thumb drive.
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Re:Obvious user question (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Obvious user question (Score:5, Funny)
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Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Obvious user question (Score:4, Funny)
Why does this frecking site do not work in ie6...
It does work, just different, just as Microsoft intended.
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Works in Safari too (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Works in Safari too (Score:4, Informative)
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Works in Safari too (Score:4, Informative)
we've been playing with that one on Safari and Chrome side-=by-side. Chrome's JS is significantly faster, but it does have a bug in that text (inside the google search bar) only appears if the bar is level. On Safari it appears when the bar is at an angle.
Performance: FF is acceptable, Safari is worse so some are ok, some are not, Couldn't be bothered to try it on IE.
Chrome performs like client desktops used to. I look forward to our new browser-based overlords.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Not entirely. In Chrome you can still type in the form and click on the buttons and they actually submit the page giving you search results. When I tried it in Firefox 3.0.7 on Windows and Linux, I could not select the text box once it had fallen, nor did clicking the buttons do anything. If I select the text box before it falls I can keep typing, but hitting enter also does not submit the form.
Re:Works in Safari too (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, the gravity thing seems to work on Firefox 3 as well. Most of these things should work with a browser that is relatively standards compliant.
The gravity thing works in Firefox, but it is environment dependent. When I turned the monitor on it's side, nothing happened. You've got to have the monitor perfectly level.
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Can I throw a ball from one iPhone to another?
Why play catch when I can just sit on my butt to throw a ball?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
...Apple is hoping will make the lack of flash on the iPhone a moot point.
This certainly does make Flash obsolete. What we really need now is an open source program that makes creating such content as simple as it is in Flash.
Re:Works in Safari too (Score:4, Informative)
Yep. I guess most video sites will move swiftly to javascript-decoding and rendering their flvs and mp4s.
HTML 5 [wikipedia.org] has <audio> and <video> tags, the actual decoding and rendering is handled by the browser.
Parent
Re:Works in Safari too (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, there was no intersection whatsoever. The closest they got was that most of the browsers would support OGG natively, and Safari would support OGG through a Quicktime plugin. There is good news, however. The spec is designed to fall back from one format to the next. So if I have an OGG video file, I can have an MP4 fallback. I'd need two video files on the server (not so different from today's FLV/MP4 situation on Youtube, but the browser would work out which video it can show.
Parent
Re:Works in Safari too (Score:5, Interesting)
If you have Firefox 3.1:
http://tinyvid.tv/ [tinyvid.tv]
Real time Chroma-Key replacement: https://developer.mozilla.org/samples/video/chroma-key/index.xhtml [mozilla.org]
(Let's see you do THAT in Flash!)
Please be gentle with my server, but here's my own Chroma-Key experiments for Firefox 3.1b3:
http://iambatman.homeip.net/html5/index.xhtml [homeip.net]
Click "Play", then mess with the "Chroma Key", "Invert", and "Mute" buttons to your heart's delight.
(The video is a random green screen video pulled off of Youtube.)
Note that this should work in Safari 4 with the OGG plugin. Unfortunately, the OGG plugin is out of date for Windows. It would be easy to configure MP4 as a fallback for Safari, but I haven't gotten that far yet. :P
Parent
Friendly competition still, right? (Score:2, Funny)
Hello Slashdot..? (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's a story: On the day Microsoft releases IE 8 -- the most popular web browser in the world -- Slashdot doesn't mention it, but posts a trivial article about Google Chrome benchmarks.
Re:Hello Slashdot..? (Score:4, Informative)
Push your MS-branded horns back into your head -- IE8 isn't being released until noon.
Maybe, just maybe, they're waiting to release when you can actually download the browser?
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
IE8 is not the most popular browser in the world since no one uses it currently, and I rather doubt it will gain the dominance ie6 once had.
Four words "to little to late"!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
also 4 'o's
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It may be too little, but MSIE has one thing that will have practically everyone installing it ... mandated installation via windows update.
"Your browser [Firefox 3] is not the latest version of MSIE, were updating it in the background and setting IE8 as your default browser, to cancel this update please remove your HDD and smash with a hammer."
Re:Hello Slashdot..? (Score:5, Insightful)
Tinfoil hats... Go!
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Re:Hello Slashdot..? (Score:5, Interesting)
On the day Microsoft releases IE 8 -- the most popular web browser in the world -- Slashdot doesn't mention it, but posts a trivial article about Google Chrome benchmarks.
So, there may be no IE 8 story, but this one is hardly trivial. The things Google did in these benchmarks were previously only done in Flash. This is a major breakthrough in developing an alternative to Flash.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.elizium.nu/scripts/lemmings/ [elizium.nu] - Lemmings in DHTML
This worked fine in IE6. Nothing here is all that impressive to me.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Just to give a serious answer. Microsoft has lost the minds of the developers with their IE6 shenannigangs, it is their luck that this has not trickled down to the average users and corporate departements.
But even if Microsoft would come out with a browser 10 years ahead of the competition (which they clearly wont they just have reached the years 2003 given the state of ie8) it would get a lukewarm response. With IE6 and stopping the development for 6 years because there was no competition while everyone mo
Re:Hello Slashdot..? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Limited platforms (Score:5, Insightful)
That's what it's all about in the demoscene, right? People are in awe when they see what you can do in 64kB on a PC and what a 6502 can do with cycle-exact programming. Yet anyone interested more in results than in technical experiments will simply expand the platform and make these demos look like child's play, because that's what they are: An exercise in testing the limits of a very limited platform. HTML and the javascript browser API should never have become the basis of a UI standard. The privacy problems, performance deficiencies and the baroque API will haunt us for decades. Look ma, I'm using a 2GHz dual-core processor to simulate a couple of 2D balls bouncing around in almost fluid motion.
Re:Limited platforms (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
"HTML and the javascript browser API should never have become the basis of a UI standard."
Amen. The problem is that some people believe that their work doesn't count unless they do it the hard way.
I don't see a better alternative (Score:3, Insightful)
As a cross-platform UI standard that allows a mix of server-side and client-side code for server-hosted apps that nonetheless can run on high-latency links, Ajaxy HTML with the HTML5 extensions doesn't seem terrible. It certainly has much better performance than doing something equivalent in X11 over ssh, for example.
Google Gravity... a blast from the past! (Score:2)
Ah, a classic hack... variations of this date back to the '70s. I wrote one around 1980, and I'm sure I wasn't the first. A few years back I was googling around and came across it:
rot [scarydevil.com].
This is a fixed version. There was one bug in the original... the timer to slow the update down didn't work, but since a high speed display back then was 9600 baud I'd never noticed.
Linkage (Score:3, Insightful)
DUPE (Score:5, Informative)
This was reported on yesterday: http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/18/2128256 [slashdot.org]
Here's my comment [slashdot.org] about real-time Chroma-Key replacement in Firefox.
Javascript performance (Score:5, Insightful)
There's been a lot of stories lately about new browser releases and how they have the fastest Javascript performance yet.
I asked why Javascript performance was such a big deal, and I didn't feel any answers I got were particularly convincing.
These experiments however have answered my question much more convincingly, the answer is not that existing applications need it but that future innovations in Javascript can achieve some pretty amazing things if Javascript implementations are efficient enough.
Opera (Score:4, Informative)
And most of them work just fine in Opera 9.64, despite the scary warnings.
And the ones that don't, it seems to be because Opera deliberately disallows that sort of action (e.g. the pages knowing where they are on screen in relation to other pages).
Re:I'll take my Firefox add-ons instead , thanks (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:so nothing that's actually useful, then? (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously though, what exactly is accomplished here?
First and foremost it's a marketing stunt. If you launch an "experiment" in any other browser than Google Chrome they warn you that it might not work (but allow you to "Roll the dice" and try.
Second, it shows that it's possible to do pretty things using the common web standards alone, without proprietary plugins like flash or silverlight.
I'd rather see that time spent getting a proper version for Linux, and extension support.
That's really close minded. The teams working on Chromium/Google Chrome are not the people behind these demos and the lack of Linux and extension support is being worked on - I'd rather wait a little longer than them becoming a major clusterfuck. Besides, these demos are really just a fun prove of concept.
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Very useful, in fact! (Score:3, Insightful)
>Second, it shows that it's possible to do pretty things using the common web standards alone, without proprietary plugins like flash or silverlight.
THIS RIGHT HERE!
The whole point of this is to show that there is no need for stupid plugins like Flash and Silverlight.
When HTML5 comes around with support for Video and Audio, the experiments that depended on Flash can be amended to work with them.
When i saw these experiments, i cried manly tears of joy.
Let this be the beginning of the end!
To hell with plug
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Right, except creating these simple animations in Flash takes all of 5 minutes for a complete novice. Doing them in HTML takes a crack team of Google wizards countless man-hours to build an API, work around all the quirks... Like another poster said, it's like the demoscene. Yeah it's neat that you can do these tricks on a crappy platform, but that does not make it practical.
I was writing craptacular Javascript games fifteen years ago, toggling background colors and images in table cells like a dot-matri
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Look, we all know where this is headed. Google is a web based company and they want to develop web based applications. Think about all they are doing in this space. Things like Chrome and that Native API browser stuff. They want to deliver applications over the web and are exploring all the possibilities to get the performance they need.
Web-delivered full-scale applications is what Google's goal is, I just know it. It's like a throwback to the Java days, but different.