CoolPreviews, an addon for Firefox, caused the PacMan music to play even when the user wasn't viewing google.com. They've released an update that fixes the issue.
Bad move by google, really. Start on a button click is one thing but auto-starting something that makes a bunch of noise on a page that has always been totally silent is really dumb.
Google doesn't autostart anything, it's a FireFox extension (Cool Previews) that loads the page in the background that causes the trouble. I suggest reading up on the real story before you start labeling things as "bad moves" and "really dumb".
You wouldn't be prepared to write 3,162 lines of code for something with a guaranteed audience of hundreds of millions of people? What does it take for you to get out of bed? Billions of viewers?
On an unrelated note, as of 3:33PM EST, this story has 262 points over 4 hours, and is ranked lower than "Facebook caught sharing secret data with advertisers", which has 210 points over 16 hours (this story ranked 27, the facebook story 23). Is there a reason for this? Shouldn't this be near the top of HN?
Now, when I go to the address bar and type a query whose first Google result I am confident will be the destination I want, I've got a great way to get there.
Example:
"gg imdb Forest Gump"
Will get me to IMDB's Forest Gump page. So you can pretty much imagine the power here, especially for reference sites. Type the site name and the query, and you'll end up where you want to be.
Google is replacing the need for the "I'm feeling lucky" button with their auto-complete system. It's the same effect as the button but is shown in the auto-complete field while the user is typing.
This has the same side effect for Google regarding ads as does the button. Although if a user wants to be taken directly to website ABC they prob aren't a good audience for ads.
This is great, except for that some element of Google (address bar search?) is running in the background of my firefox browser and the siren audio is on a continuous loop even after leaving Google. No add-on or plug-in I remove helps.
Unfortunately Flash is currently pretty much unavoidable if you want sound effects in JS games.
I experimented with <audio> tag in HTML5 game few days ago: it's fine for media player type applications (where you play longer sounds with looser coupling to user actions), but it's not there yet for games (implementation-wise, API is ok).
If you need to play a lot of tiny sounds in rapid response to player actions, you are going to get random weird behaviors and cross-browser inconsistencies: noticeable lags, cracking noises, cuts and repetitions.
This seems to be heavily depended on the file types you use. I have some experiments with many different, short, sound files running with <audio> just fine - in Chrome, FF and Opera at least.
Ogg Vorbis and (of course WAV) works quite nice, MP3 doesn't. For Safari, maybe AAC would be the right choice. Still, as you said, the <audio> implementation is quite buggy at times. But I have no doubt it will get better!
Yes, a good point. I confirm, also in my experience problems are very dependent on particular sound files. Some work perfectly fine, some make troubles.
And it's not just encoding, it seems to be dependent also on what's inside the sound file like a particular waveform or length.
For me the worst were a sequences of very short sounds (fractions of second) played in a direct response to rapid successive keypresses (keydown-keydown-keydown should make pew-pew-pew). No matter what I did, there was always at least one browser with some showstopping bug.
What's the matter with you guys? THe PacMan thing was great. What a fun surprise. I've been to Google now 10 times in the past two days-- and I usually only use their serach engine once or twice a day. Stopped me from going to dogpile......
Someone needs to publish a revised PacMan strategy guide for getting around all those extra obstacles. Should you get pellot inside the G at the start or end?
