Google's Amazing Browser Experiments

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."

Comments

Re:Hello Slashdot..?

[Thelasko]

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

[AKAImBatman]

If you have Firefox 3.1:

http://tinyvid.tv/

Real time Chroma-Key replacement: https://developer.mozilla.org/samples/video/chroma-key/index.xhtml

(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

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 Unfortunately, the OGG plugin is out of date for Windows.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

[AKAImBatman]

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.