And the other day I saw a HN comment for another one of these HTML5 demos that it kept crashing someone's iOS Safari browser. Apparently Flash doesn't just suck because Adobe are useless, but because interaction and animation is a hard problem to solve.
That said, this was pretty cool. The 3D was a bit "Money for nothing", and my Chrome gave me 10 seconds of beachball each time it switched from 2D video to 3D, but it's still showing that the web is moving forward (to CD-ROMs from the 90's)
One thing I've noticed is when running a WebGL demo in Chrome on a Mac, if another window partially overlaps the WebGL animation it freezes up the entire system.
It's obviously still a work in progress, but I think it will be fantastic when all the kinks are worked out.
That could be because the demo doesn't use requestAnimationFrame. This javascript call will stop whatever function it's given when the canvas is out of view. Frankly I've only noticed major issue on Mac. I'm developing a WebGL app and my boss on a mac had the habit of moving to different tabs without closing my demo before the requestAnimationFrame was introduced. Lets just say he wasn't too happy ;p
I also remember when we all thought that HTML5 would bring interoperability... Instead of "Designed for IE" we now have "Designed for Chrome". Is Google really that much better than Microsoft, or does the internet just have goldfish-like memory.
Google updates their browser every 12 weeks, and they're making sure everyone upgrades. While IE9 is a nice upgrade, IE still lags behind the other modern browsers. Furthermore, to date they have no plans to support WebGL. Id gladly put Google in Microsoft's place.
Having said that, we should be converging on open standards.
it's important to remember that the W3C is dependent on working implementations for specs to become finalized recommendations. the fact that you can use the latest HTML5 and CSS3 features, even if their spec isn't finished yet, isn't some kind of nefarious plot to embrace, extend, etc., and vendor prefixes, as annoying as they are, just mean that we won't be burdened later if specs change before they are finished.
the webgl 1.0 spec has been finalized. even though this was built with some google employees and is featured on a chrome experiments page, it works just fine in my Firefox 4 and webkit nightly. I think we'll be ok.
It's more accurate to describe this as "Designed for everyone but IE". (IE is welcome to the party, but isn't interested yet.)
WebGL is new and there are a lot of issues being worked out right now, in the field, while we watch. As we move from getcontext("moz-webgl") to "experimental-webgl" to plain, old "webgl", these interop issues are slowly going away. In the mean time, lots of things are going to be broken along the way. Besides, if it all worked right out of the gate, that would mean they were not pushing far enough. ;)
Hey, remember when we all thought that HTML5 and emerging technologies like webgl would be so cool and so much more secure than Flash? Yeah....