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.'"

Comments

Why is this tagged Chrome

[Anonymous Coward]

When firefox kicks the shit out of it in the benchmark

Re:Why is this tagged Chrome

[Anonymous Coward]

When firefox kicks the shit out of it in the benchmark

Because Chrome fanboys* are a lot like Apple fanboys* -- unconcerned with objective evidence of any kind. They are unable to appreciate Mozilla's accomplishments and strengths because they weren't done by "their team" and anyone not on "their team" is TEH ENEMY. Course, "their team" is sort of like the fat couch potatoes who see their favorite football team win a game and say "fuck yeah, we won" and the only correct response is "really? I didn't see you out there on that field". So they won, you shallow dipshits who'd have no identity whatsoever if you couldn't borrow some organization's.

* There's a big, BIG difference between someone who uses a thing because it meets his/her needs and gives a satisfying experience but has no special loyalty to any corporation or brand name, versus someone who must fanatically defend their favorite corporate logo and make it look good whether or not it deserves to like some religious crusade because it's become an unhealthy extension of their ego. I know the Slashdot crowd doesn't do such a good job making these distinctions so I am spelling it out for you. Oh you'll knee-jerk anyway but now you'll do it with no excuse.

Re:Why is this tagged Chrome

[adamofgreyskull]

tl;dr watch this.

All OSX browsers are really slow here

[dotwhynot]

Kind of ironic when Apple is the company that is most vocal about HTML5 replacing Flash. http://developers.facebook.com/attachment/scores.png

Re:All OSX browsers are really slow here

[inpher]

They tested Chrome 11 and Firefox 4 and IE9 (all development versions) but not the development version of Safari: WebKit.

Re:All OSX browsers are really slow here

[inpher]

Still a development versions. Makes no sense to exclude development versions of Opera and Safari when they both are readily available.

Re:All OSX browsers are really slow here

[inpher]

Core Animation is the way to animate 2D on Mac OS X (and iOS). It is what is used to animate CSS (which the article touches upon). From what I can tell reading various developer blogs Core Animation seems pretty well liked.

Re:Facebook engineers?

[dakameleon]

Think in terms of "software engineers" - 500 million users is a hefty workload for any single site.

HTML5?

[BenoitRen]

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.

Re:HTML5?

[tepples]

Except for the canvas element, there's not much HTML5 to be found here.

It's precisely the 2D canvas that makes HTML5 game graphics practical.

Re:Facebook engineers?

[FuckingNickName]

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.

Re:Flipping

[BZ]

Yes, but the original claim was that you have to do HTML5 games in canvas because you can't flip images otherwise. IE8 doesn't support canvas either, so if you're writing an HTML5 game with canvas you aren't targeting IE8 to start with.