Posted 03/19/10 at 08:07:26 PM by Ryan Whitwam

It’s often said that HTML5 will take over the web and push out the current mishmash of standards. Microsoft and Adobe would like to respectfully disagree with that. At the recent Open Source Business Conference executives from both companies said they believe the future of the web will include their proprietary formats, Flash and Silverlight.

Microsoft did have nice things to say about HTML5 though. They plan to use the standard in conjunction with their own plug-ins. Adobe too said they’d utilize HTML5, pointing to their web tools space. Of open source in general, both execs agreed that it could be an efficient way to distribute software.

The battle for multimedia delivery is still just getting under way, but plug-in (especially Flash) have a big head start. Do you think HTML5 will come out on top, or are we looking at a mixture of standards?

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Posted 03/10/10 at 07:28:11 PM by Ryan Whitwam

The recent announcement of the iPad, and revelation that it would not support Adobe Flash, revived debate on the plug-in’s future. If you take Steve Jobs’ word for it, Flash is a CPU hog now and always. Video encoding expert Jan Ozer decided to look into it himself, and the results may surprise you.

On both Mac and Windows platforms, Ozer tested Safari, Chrome, and Firefox (additionally IE was tested on Windows). Safari on the Mac showed HTML5 besting Flash by a wide margin with only 12.39% CPU utilization versus 37.41% for Flash 10.0 and 32.07% for 10.1. Chrome saw HTML5 and both version of Flash with almost 50% CPU usage. Firefox doesn’t support the HTML5 encoding used, but Flash results were similar to Safari.

On Windows, it’s a different story. Safari’s CPU utilization on Flash 10.0 was 23.22%, but 10.1 showed only 7.43% used. Chrome was the only Windows browser that both Flash and HTML5 could be tested in. On Google’s browser, HTML5 used a sizable 25.66% of the CPU. Flash 10.0 was up at 22.00%, but 10.1 used only 6%. Firefox and IE showed similar huge gains from the 10.1 version of Adobe Flash.

Clearly, the GPU acceleration on Windows makes a huge difference and means Flash is more efficient than HTML5 most of the time. The Mac, however, does not expose the necessary APIs for Adobe to do GPU acceleration. Adobe has said the "the ball is in Apple's court". So Apple does not allow Flash to run efficiently on OSX by denying the plug-in access to the graphics hardware? Given these Windows test results, we think that’s kind of unacceptable. Where do you come down in the streaming standards battle?

Make sure you check out Jan Ozer's full rundown here.

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Posted 12/08/09 at 07:33:36 PM by Ryan Whitwam

Has it really been a year since Google rolled out Offline Gmail? The exceedingly useful feature allows users to compose, sort, and search mail when no internet connection is available. Now Offline Gmail is leaving Google Labs and becoming a permanent part of the Gmail experience. The feature, as implemented, uses Google Gears to create a local storage cache. This is somewhat interesting given Google’s plans to ditch Google Gears and move to HTML5. Will the offline features be updated prior to the release of Chrome OS?

 Coinciding with Offline Gmail’s departure from labs, Google has added two new features that were requested by users during the testing period. Gmail will now allow users to decide which messages are downloaded for offline use. You can now also queue up attachments to mail while offline.

If you haven’t been using this feature in the labs, you’ll still need to enable it in settings. If you’ve been using it this past year, what’s your experience been like?

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Posted 10/01/09 at 06:00:25 PM by Jason Barry

Similar to the IE Chrome Frame that Google released late last month, Mozilla suspects that Google’s engineers would have Firefox suffer the same fate.

The “Chrome Frame” idea is that within a completely different browser, Internet Explorer for example, one can view the website as Google’s Chrome browser would render it. The site can also take advantage of Chrome's latest technologies without installing a new browser.

Mozilla’s VP seemed a bit peeved about the whole thing. While it is still speculation on whether Google plans to create the plug-in, Mike Shraver, VP of engineering at Mozilla, says “I hope they won’t.” The biggest argument against Google, from Microsoft and now Mozilla, is that it over complicates the browsing process and can break certain aspects of the browser. Further, that HTML5 (supported in Chrome) is not a specified standard, and developers should be wary about developing with something that is not yet set in stone.

Ultimately, one would think Google’s thought process on the plug-in might be “one browser to rule them all,” and we all know how that turned out.

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Posted 09/14/09 at 08:04:58 PM by Ryan Whitwam

A big WebGL patch has recently been released, bringing us a step closer to 3D gaming in the browser. WebGL is a project attempting to bring a few new features to HTML5 allowing JavaScript binding to OpenGL ES 2.0. When complete, this could mean fairly complex 3D games running in a WebKit browser with no plugins required.

It may even be possible to see support for WebGL in native WebKit browsers in as little as 6 months. Safari and Chrome are probably on the forefront of this technology, as they are based on WebKit. Firefox, while based on the Gecko engine, has an extension capable of displaying a WebGL 3D canvas. As for Internet Explorer, don’t hold your breath. Microsoft still has yet to implement HTML5, let alone upcoming technologies.

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Posted 07/17/09 at 08:21:04 PM by Pulkit Chandna

The Apple App Store for the iPhone/iPod Touch has proved to be a huge hit and forced the introduction of similar services on rival mobile platforms. However, Vic Gundotra, vp of engineering at Google, believes such app stores will not have much of an impact in the future. He expects mobile web browsers to be more than equipped to deliver all kinds of content in the future.

“Many, many applications can be delivered through the browser and what that does for our costs is stunning,” Gundotra said at the Mobilebeat Conference in San Francisco. Palm’s Michael Abbot seconded his opinion and cited the introduction of HTML5 standards, which has made it easier for web apps to make use of a phone’s hardware, as a portent of things to follow.

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