4 ms·

Please ignore the bad reporting / marketing spin and focus on what actually Chrome team did. The change is significant and important. It doesn't really matter

by bd 16y ago

Please ignore the bad reporting / marketing spin and focus on what actually Chrome team did. The change is significant and important. It doesn't really matter that your current web applications will have more or less the same speed. Removing a huge performance bottleneck [1] paves a way for completely new type of applications, so far unheard of on the web (way beyond what's possible with Flash [2]). And other browsers will follow, Firefox already has its own solution on the way. Trust me, this is big news, though the effects will be felt only in some time. Developers have to catch up. Even "oldfashioned" unaccelerated 2d canvas is still very far from reaching its full potential. ------- [1] This bottleneck was coming mainly from compositing of classical software rendered web content and new hardware accelerated content. New way is to do everything HW accelerated (that's BTW why fonts look bit off in new Chrome and Firefox). [2] Just wait till WebGL will be enabled by default in upcoming Firefox 4 and Chrome 7. There is a marked difference in capabilities, shaders are crazy powerful.

tomjen3 16y ago
It is big news, but there is a gigantic caveat here - most people will still be running ancient browsers which can't do this. But flash is universal.
xal 16y ago
This is right on the money. People will be blown away by what google maps will look like after enough browsers have WebGL capabilities and the maps team switches to that technology instead of the crude javascript tiling that they rely on right now.
- rbranson 16y ago
  Unfortunately the companies that they (Bing, Yahoo, Google, etc) buy the map data from would be very much against pushing their precious vector data out into the public. All of the licensing is setup and specifically deals with tiling maps. It will take years and years before the lawyers agree to it and figure out the licensing details. Perhaps Google can circumvent this in the US because they own their US data, but what about the rest of the world?
gruseom 16y ago
that's BTW why fonts look bit off in new Chrome Hey, I'm struggling with that right now. Simple calls to Canvas fillText produce text that is way too heavy in Chrome. (The same calls work ok in FF.) I must be doing something wrong because Bespin uses Canvas and their text looks normal. Any guesses as to what it might be?
- bd 16y ago
  I don't know, there are some slight differences in canvas font renderers between Firefox and Chrome even in unaccelerated browsers. Try to use exactly the same font settings as in Bespin. It may be that "10px Arial" is ok but "0.9em sans-serif" looks very different.

by bd 16y ago

tomjen3 16y ago

It is big news, but there is a gigantic caveat here - most people will still be running ancient browsers which can't do this. But flash is universal.

xal 16y ago

This is right on the money. People will be blown away by what google maps will look like after enough browsers have WebGL capabilities and the maps team switches to that technology instead of the crude javascript tiling that they rely on right now.

rbranson 16y ago
Unfortunately the companies that they (Bing, Yahoo, Google, etc) buy the map data from would be very much against pushing their precious vector data out into the public. All of the licensing is setup and specifically deals with tiling maps. It will take years and years before the lawyers agree to it and figure out the licensing details. Perhaps Google can circumvent this in the US because they own their US data, but what about the rest of the world?

gruseom 16y ago

that's BTW why fonts look bit off in new Chrome Hey, I'm struggling with that right now. Simple calls to Canvas fillText produce text that is way too heavy in Chrome. (The same calls work ok in FF.) I must be doing something wrong because Bespin uses Canvas and their text looks normal. Any guesses as to what it might be?

bd 16y ago
I don't know, there are some slight differences in canvas font renderers between Firefox and Chrome even in unaccelerated browsers. Try to use exactly the same font settings as in Bespin. It may be that "10px Arial" is ok but "0.9em sans-serif" looks very different.