> is the browser really the right place for games like Mass Effect? It's not now, but it will be soon. The browser is the right place for games where the bene

> is the browser really the right place for games like Mass Effect? It's not now, but it will be soon. The browser is the right place for games where the benefits (arguably: low friction, ease of installation, cross-platform development, everyone knows javascript) justify the costs (arguably: worse performance, lack of client-side storage for large assets, users like owning things, rapidly shifting platform, lack of peripheral access, less sophisticated audio, no UDP). So in practice, the browser is the right place for games with low enough CPU, graphics, data, and I/O requirements. But that target is moving really fast -- partly because computers keep getting better, and partly because Google et al. are working really hard to squeeze the layers between Javascript and bare metal as thin as possible. So you could imagine a wavefront following about ten years behind us: the browser is currently the right place for games that would have been state-of-the-art in [2002] or before. Plus or minus ten years. You might ask, why would we put Mass Effect in the browser even when we could? If I can get really wild-eyed for a minute, I think the answer is that the browser is trying to become Neil Stephenson's Metaverse. It's the place where everyone and everything comes together in one geography. Do apps run on the server or the client? Is content user-generated or developer-generated? Is this a file system or a database? Is the API the product? Is the mobile web just the regular web? We're putting more and more complicated apps on the web because that's where they're linkable, hackable, bookmarkable, tweetable, mashable -- because if you ask me to download your thing and install it on one particular device, it's like asking me to leave the whole world and join you in your private copy, where you guard the entrances and exits and the only stuff is the stuff that you built. OK, that was pretty nuts. But see if you can make it less nuts rather than shoot it down -- is there something fundamental we're trying to do when we put anything and everything within the frame of the browser?