the web has come far..

[piratePenguin]

Paul Rouget on Mixing the web! (Mozilla Summit 2010)

[Lead Head]

That is some seriously impressive stuff. Can't believe that is all being done without Flash or Silverlight. HTML5 can't come soon enough.

[Aloone_Jonez]

This looks cool but doesn't mean much until most browsers support it which means we'll have to wait for ever for IE to.

How about just making an IE plug-in which opens the page using a webkit or gecko rendering engine if IE is detected? All of the most popular sites such as Google, Wikipedia and YouTube could push people into installing it so no one will use the old IE engine most of the time and be mostly unaware of it.

[piratePenguin]

This looks cool but doesn't mean much until most browsers support it which means we'll have to wait for ever for IE to.

How about just making an IE plug-in which opens the page using a webkit or gecko rendering engine if IE is detected? All of the most popular sites such as Google, Wikipedia and YouTube could push people into installing it so no one will use the old IE engine most of the time and be mostly unaware of it.

http://www.google.com/chromeframe

Alternative browsers have 50% share or something around there - that's huge. Of course this stuff isn't useful on mainstream sites just yet but it's exciting technology to play with. Btw IE9 is taking on an impressive amount of standards - it will be a good browser.

[Aloone_Jonez]

IE 9 won't be available for Windows XP meaning that IE 8 will continue to reign for a long time to come.

Chrome frame sounds good and Google certainly have enough leverage to make it a standard plugin, if IE 9 isn't standards compliant enough for some of the advanced features they might want to implement.

[Lead Head]

Check this out:
http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/

It *works* in FireFox, but runs much better in Chrome - and probably Safari as well.

[Aloone_Jonez]

It doesn't work in Opera, the music plays but not the film.

It's impressive though it bit jerky which is probably because I have an old computer but it might be faster in Chrome, although I've not tested it yet.

[piratePenguin]

Check this out:
http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/

It *works* in FireFox, but runs much better in Chrome - and probably Safari as well.

(Haven't ran the demo yet, will do once I'm using Chrome) edit: couldn't run the experiment on my computer using chromium, waited 5 minutes and was stuck on 73%.. just too slow.

One of the goals of Firefox 4 is to have the fastest Javascript interpreter (which, with V8 already there, would be an impressive feat, but the importance of which is bigger than ever). Take a look at the graphs here: http://arewefastyet.com/
You see Firefox 4 making steady gains on 2 different branches - neither branch is as fast as V8 but they're clearly heading in the right direction, and also both branches are complementary. Once JaegerMonkey (made the mistake of almost calling it Jaegermeister again..) is stable, it will be integrated and make the whole thing much faster. This will be an insane asset, especially because all browsers will have fast JS engines (I think this is true about IE, but not sure).

(this goes down well with my attitude of using Javascript to do everything, even out of curiosity started working on a JS video codec drawn using canvas (may release this out of curiosity too).. who really wants to use low-level languages with so much being pumped into making javascript faster? The programming language of the web is a very important one..) related: serverside-javascript has recently gained a tonne of momentum, http://nodejs.org/

[hm_murdock]

Oh no. More ways to make fake software on the interwebs. Just what we need, CPU-muching browsers that give us a slower, less useful, less worthwhile computer experience!

All this stuff I see looks really great, but still nobody has sold on the why of it. Why is this better than real software running on a real computer as opposed to some HTML stuff in a browser? I can run Word '08 on my old G4, or OpenOffice on any computer around and it's perfectly quick, capable, has at least the features I need (and then about a trillion others I don't) but most of all it. Can. Save. To. My. Hard. Disk. I don't have to rely on Google or Oracle or some fly-by-night cloud storage provider who might get bought up and thus shut down.

The web sure has come far. Too bad the destination is a giant tar pit of fucking fail.

[Refalm]

It's because updating software is a bitch. Especially on Windows, where even applications have to be updated manually.

A web-application and storage that is wholly on a self-owned server, instead of Google or Zoho, is a great idea because a lot of issues with security patches are gone. It's just updating a web application once, and then it's okay.

[piratePenguin]

Google Docs allows you to save to your harddrive. Indeed most office solutions should and they do.

The why of the web? Refalm mentioned one aspect. How about the ability to seemlessly access and edit all of your documents through one well-understood interface on your Windows work pc, your home mac or gnu/linux computer, your tablet, etc? Launch the URL and do what you need. How about the web is the most important information resource we have, and making it richer, while remaining very much backwards compatible whereever that's possible, will be an improvement making it simpler to create richer applications, while in fact making things faster? I basically think you're dissing the technology when you should perhaps turn your attention to the websites and web-developer decisions. The majority of professional web developers know too much about backwards compatibility in the sense of IE support and not in the sense of working on all types of configurations including super-slow computers (except mobiles), but you have to ask yourself what is their interest in putting resources into those configurations, but I think the efforts of those designing the technology are pretty much as substantial as they can be for keeping the web accessible to everyone, as is indeed one of the motives of the web originally.

Just what we need, CPU-muching browsers that give us a slower, less useful, less worthwhile computer experience!

You can always use an old browser but in many cases this will not make your web experience faster! this is due to the momentous efforts by many companies at making JS become the fastest interpreted language it can be.

You can disable JS and there may be pages on the web that should work better for people who have JS disabled, but that's between those people and the websites - not the technologies of the web! (which are substantial in areas of compatibility and accessibility) HTML is still supported! In fact it's one of the only standards we can expect to be supported in 50 years time.

What about your Word files? What do you think those users are gonna do in 50 years time?

Gmail has a static interface option, other big email servers too. But other than that you have to ask where the demand for it is. Very few people do not use JS, I would argue that almost everyone bar people with serious resource limits should be turning it on.

[Aloone_Jonez]

I agree with JJ that web applications are shit compared to real software. I'd rather use MS Word than Google Docs because it's faster and more streamlined. I don't think Google are going to fall any time soon but at least when a normal software developer goes under yo still have a copy of their software on your hard drive or can download it from a warez site.

However, I think JJ has missed the point about HTML 5 which is all about an open standard to allow web developers to do things which were only previously possible using proprietary platforms such as flash and multimedia codecs.

Talking of Java, why on earth hasn't any chip considered making a hardware accelerator?  Surely that's got to be the best thing speed-wise.

[piratePenguin]

Who said Java? Do you mean Javascript?

I started looking into this a number of years ago and I believed I've written about it here, though I can't find my old posts. (Refalm, is there some display a list of threads started by a particular user?)

Anyways I'm sure that I found years ago hardware XML and/or XSLT parsers, doubt if they could be any addition except in mobile devices (optimized code running in our speedy cpus would seem to be faster) and btw they're not that important for the web since 99.9% of web content is html or html5 parsed.

I'm sure you'll get results for "hardware accelerated javascript" on google, it would seem like a huge task, and one that could be best undertaken by the huger chip manufacturers. I really think JS is becoming hugely important and hardware acceleration should be explored.  We are right now experiencing speed gains at the hands of all web-browsers in JS performance due to JIT and tracing (optimizing JS loops and methods for your cpu), but particularly for mobile devices hardware acceleration could be the best way to go.

However I thought you would have a better idea of how big of a task this is - it would seem gigantic, no? Especially with the way JS is hooked in with browser interfaces, I don't know how it would work.

[Aloone_Jonez]

I admit I don't know much about Java script other than it's an interpreted language executed in a VM.

Yes, I imagine it's possible to make a Java VM in hardare inwhich case it would no longer be a VM but a real machine and agree that it will not be an easy task. All I can say is that, if you decide to take an electronics course, do a module on FPGAs, team up with some of your fellow students, write a hardware JS processor yourself and release it under a FOSS licence of course.

I've done a Google and most of the results are focused on graphics acceleration but Arm have such a technology.
http://www.arm.com/products/processors/technologies/jazelle.php

It would be cool to have Java code running at native speed.

[Lead Head]

Anyone see Google's logo today? Some HTML5 goodness for you there.

I tried loading it up at school, and its amazing how much shittier it looks on IE8.