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Facebook Develops HTML5 Gaming Benchmark
An anonymous reader writes "A couple of Facebook engineers are developing an HTML5 gaming benchmark. They write, 'Two weeks ago Bruce and I released JSGameBench version 0.1. Today marks the release of version 0.2, a much faster and cleaner version. We continue to learn both from tightening the code and from the strong HTML5 community. Version 0.2 reinforces our belief in HTML5 as a strong, horizontal platform for games and highly interactive applications across the web.'"
When firefox kicks the shit out of it in the benchmark
Didn't they just release Chrome 10 beta? It's still on the front page of Slashdot (at this time).
Unicode in Slashdot
Kind of ironic when Apple is the company that is most vocal about HTML5 replacing Flash. http://developers.facebook.com/attachment/scores.png
They serve a massive number of complicated pages. They have been hiring people away from Google and such.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Think in terms of "software engineers" - 500 million users is a hefty workload for any single site.
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
Except for the canvas element, there's not much HTML5 to be found here. It's mostly about DOM manipulation using JavaScript and about fancy new CSS styles.
If you're really so good at making sites that serve billions of page views per month, has fairly low latency across the globe despite the huge volume and variety of requests being processed, has marketed itself successfully to half a billion active users worldwide, interface with hundreds of thousands of third party apps, work on a range of mobile devices... and no matter how crude and low-tech the front-end UI may feel to the end user, IT WORKS. If all these are just "routine IT skills" for you - ok, great, just show me where you're on the Forbes list and I'll definitely pay my respects.
If not, you're just a sore loser.
Is Facebook releasing this to rationalize their creation of ineffective code?
If you're really so good at making sites that serve billions of page views per month
Creating a routine site which "serves billions of page views per month" is a routine IT skill. Hell, creating a routine site which serves millions of page views requires no expertise at all, and is something I'm sure lots of enthusiasts posting here have done before the days of point-and-click blogs and social networking sites. So, is Facebook routine?
has fairly low latency across the globe despite the huge volume
Fifteen years ago called. They want your cutting edge content delivery network research.
has marketed itself successfully to half a billion active users worldwide
No disagreement here. Facebook knows how to sell itself.
interface with hundreds of thousands of third party apps
Have you actually used the Facebook API? While this is the only "engineered" component of Facebook, it's (i.e. the Graph API is) basically a frontend to tables of personal information and junction/link tables between them. Again, the skill here is the routine deployment of an SQL database.
work on a range of mobile devices.
Well, not on mine, but I think what you meant was: at least vaguely tested on the devices commonly used by their employees with remaining complaints perhaps fixed eventually, and with a translation API suiting the native language of a few of the more common mobile platforms.
nd no matter how crude and low-tech the front-end UI may feel to the end user, IT WORKS.
Nonsense. It's in a perpetual state of beta, and if you haven't seen it not working it's because you haven't used it often enough to be targeted for testing - at which point something on the site will break for a while and will get fixed only because enough people whine.
If all these are just "routine IT skills" for you - ok, great, just show me where you're on the Forbes list and I'll definitely pay my respects.
Ah, the nerd of 2011, whose skill is measured by "where you're on the Forbes list".
Facebook is successful because it successfully preys on the social weaknesses of the average human. As an engineering feat, it is almost completely uninteresting.
Moving around divs is much faster
One needs to horizontally flip an image when a character in a side-scrolling platformer faces the other way. Which browser can horizontally flip an image in a div? Otherwise, download size for sprite sheets doubles, as the server has to send both the unflipped and flipped versions of every cel.
Have you actually used the Facebook API? While this is the only "engineered" component of Facebook, it's (i.e. the Graph API is) basically a frontend to tables of personal information and junction/link tables between them. Again, the skill here is the routine deployment of an SQL database.
They've actually develop their own non-relational database (Cassandra, now an Apache project).
Dilbert RSS feed
This is kind of a good point - no-one really cares that much if FBs pages break a little bit (as they often to, friends lists changing at random, comments not showing up, etc etc). You just refresh and (mostly) everything comes right.
I'm not saying that FB isn't impressive, just that they don't have to hit especially high standards of data consistency in order to be a success.
I'm ignorant when it comes to web programming. When creating games using HTML5 do developers need to be more concerned with code stealing than with Flash? There are already many duplicate games on the web, will this further compound the issue?
when shown that virtually every modern browser supports it, you responded with the one that doesn't.
I apologize for being unclear. I should have written the following: "Half of users don't use a modern browser. Good luck convincing them to."