Google's Amazing Browser Experiments 234
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."
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.
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 Unfortunately, the OGG plugin is out of date for Windows.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
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.
Re:Very useful, in fact! (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-matrix or tile engine. I did it because I was bored in class, waiting for the goddamned Windows prof to find the start button :/ There was no value to it back then, there is even less value to such hackery today when far superior tools exist.
Re:Hello Slashdot..? (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.