Thursday, March 19, 2009

Google pushes browsers to the limit with it's incredible experiments

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.

5 comments:

  1. doesn't work in IE6 :( I'll have to wait until I get home since I'm on a stupid locked-down corporate build without a proper browser

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  2. Most of these work in Safari4, and some even on the iPhone. This kind of stuff, written entirely in HTML5 and javascript, is one of the things Apple is hoping will make the lack of flash on the iPhone a moot point.

    Any decent, standards compliant browser will have no problem with these experiments.

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  3. On the day Microsoft releases IE 8 -- the most popular web browser in the world -- you don't mention it, but you post a trivial article about Google Chrome benchmarks.

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  4. 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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  5. I'm using a 2GHz dual-core processor to simulate a couple of 2D balls bouncing around in almost fluid motion.

    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.

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