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My favourite example is the HTML 5 Angry Birds game.

Angry Birds Chrome is a poor example of an HTML5 game as it relies on Flash for audio. If I try it with Firefox 14.0.1, for example, without Flash installed I get a message which tells me that I either need to install Flash or use Chrome as it has Flash built-in. Better examples of HTML5 games which work without Flash are Cut the Rope, Pirates Love Daisies, World's Biggest Pac-Man, and Word Squared.

The development of the first three games was funded by Microsoft to demonstrate that credible applications can in fact be built against an HTML5 runtime. They also demonstrate that there are already high quality applications available for Firefox OS. It's pretty trivial to make them installable on Firefox OS.

> Long time since I've seen that

Take a look at http://getcrackin.angrybirds.com/

If it were just "works best", that would be one thing, but the new trend is a real throwback to the days of "we just won't let you in if you're not using the one browser we approve of"

> Because the most-used browser is only just over
> half of the users

True on desktop. Not so much on mobile. And oddly enough sites that do UA sniffing and serve different content to "mobile" browsers have all sorts of WebKit-only stuff going on.

But even on desktop, people seem pretty happy to have it look broken in whatever browser they don't happen to be using.

And we're not talking just small sites. Google has had several instances recently where updates to things like Gmail got rolled out that were apparently not tested in any non-Chrome browsers or something, since they only worked in Chrome. At least Google considers that sort of thing a bug and fixes it quickly....

> those sites are just HTML5,

No, those sites are HTML5 plus some browser-specific additions, some of which are Chrome-only, some of which are WebKit-only, some of which are IE-only, some of which are Gecko-only, some of which are Firefox-only, etc.

> The sites will also run on other browsers if they
> support HTML5

Oh, really? Please try running http://getcrackin.angrybirds.com/ in a non-WebKit browser. The page relies on sniffing for a -webkit CSS property in a way that relies on a bug in WebKit's CSSOM implementation, and if that bug is not present of if that prefixed property is not supported, will just show you a "This game can only be played on Chrome" message and a "Download Chrome" button instead of just letting you play the damn game.

Of course if you change the source of your browser to duplicate the CSSOM bug and pretend to have support for that -webkit property, the game does work (especially well if you also add support for yet another non-standard CSS property, actually).

> it's hardly Google's fault if other browsers do not
> support HTML5

It's Google's fault if they push the idea that "Chrome" and "HTML5" are the same thing. It leads to sites like the one linked above and comments like yours....

Insofar as one can talk about "Google" as a monolithic entity anyway. Which is not very much, as evidenced by the quote you give. There are a number of distinct parts of Google that have pretty different goals (e.g. the people doing marketing and bundling deals for Chrome are pretty scummy, the Youtube folks want to build DRM support into HTML, the actual Chrome developers are pretty reasonable for the most part and not exactly always happy with the actions of other parts of Google).

Google blatantly advertisers Chrome on their websites and YouTube (but only to IE users.. heh), they have billboards and TV advertising campaigns, they pay OEM's, hardware manufacturers and shareware/freeware authors to bundle Chrome with their products, they aggressively try to put Chrome on your computer if you install any other software from Google, they pay makers of Angry Birds to have Chrome-only HTML5 version of their game and make websites that purposely only work with Chrome. They game and spam other search engines like Bing too.

Seems like they went full in and do whatever they can to get that market share. Even supporting CISPA.

Angry birds is already doing it.

This is what someone called, uhm, 'emergent ideas', or something. You think of something new only to find out someone else announced the same project a week ago!

Presumably yes, given that Chromium can be built for ARM, and there is Angry Birds for Chrome.

http://chrome.angrybirds.com/

Your welcome. Your wife has already thanked me :)

can I get angry birds for linux?

http://chrome.angrybirds.com/ seems to work fine.

My work computers run Windows XP, IE6 and Firefox 3.5 - no Flash in either browser. How can I run Angry Birds on that shitheap?

By going to Rovio's Angry Birds shop's page for Angry Birds PC Version and paying USD 4.95 or whatever the local price is for you? There's nothing there to indicate that it runs in a Web browser as a Flash game.

Go under page info -> media (in Firefox) and you'll see http://chrome.angrybirds.com/fowl/gwt-voices.swf

Your example uses flash for sound effects, which are a pretty core component of a gaming experience. Care to try again?

http://chrome.angrybirds.com/

http://chrome.angrybirds.com/

There's no Angry Birds desktop for Windows.

I know nothing about Angry Birds. As a matter of fact, I haven't ever played it nor do I ever have seen it being played by someone else. I know, I live under a rock. However, I sincerely doubt that they would leave out such a market. Now, it might be recent, but their download page says: Now available on PC.

I might have misunderstood your statement though... Perhaps, you meant "You don't need a Windows desktop to play Angry Birds", which is obviously true...

Browser applications will never be native, due to the inherent ability to customize nearly everything inside the little box. Billions of Web pages, widgets, notifiers, stock tickers, and the like have proven this. But, as soon as we begin making browser apps more native, we'll need to add code forks for Windows, Mac, Linux, etc. and begin to lose the write-once run-anywhere nature of the Web.

As Rovio has shown us, you can easily make a Web-based version of Angry Birds with HTML5 and WebGL, but good luck integrating it with the host's features (e.g., multi-touch, accelerometer, screen size...).

We might find workarounds to bring the Web closer to the metal (hopefully keeping the sandboxes reasonably intact), and as a part-time Web developer, I do welcome innovation in this area. However, if I ever hear two college programmers flipping through their JavaScript e-books on their iPad 9's looking for the function that allows firmware updates, I might just go jump off a bridge.

"Although mitigatinos such as ARB_robustness [...]"

Nice Microsoft, nice.

Whilst I believe that WebGL _could_ become a vector for attack, I think this is actually "We want to push DX not GL, let's stick to NIH by saying it's dangerous instead"

Or, maybe websites should be websites and applications should be applications. Over the last 20 years the paradigm of browser plugins/applications in the browser has been abysmal for security AND performance.

While I think it's cute that I can play angry birds in a web browser, it hogs an entire CPU core to do so. A dedicated application runs far smoother.

Looks like you either don't have Adobe Flash installed or are using an older version of Adobe Flash. To dish out revenge on the green pigs who stole the Birds' eggs you'll need to: Install Google Chrome, a fast browser from Google that comes with Flash built-in. or Install the latest version of Adobe Flash.

Pirates Love Daisies, on the other hand, is an example of a game that works well in modern browsers with no plugins.