2 ms·

3rd time in one week: please add the one line of HTML to that page that you'll need to support IE as well. You're mistaken that IECanvas will make your game s

3rd time in one week: please add the one line of HTML to that page that you'll need to support IE as well. You're mistaken that IECanvas will make your game slower in IE than it is in Firefox. Test it out, and you'll be surprised. IE has a much better rendering engine than FF, and even with the added overhead of converting all canvas calls to their SVG equivalent, it's still noticeably faster. So yeah, please fix your thing. It's one line of HTML fer cryin out loud! (nice effort, by the way)

emilam 18y ago
I'll try to let the author of the article know. I was sharing this article and I am not the author of the article.
jasonkester 18y ago
Minor correction to the above, thanks to another thread here on HN: replace SVG with VML, and IECanvas with ExplorerCanvas (excanvas.js).
Locke 18y ago
Am I reading this right? Are you actually saying ExplorerCanvas (canvas on top of VML) is faster than native canvas in firefox, webkit, etc? I have some experience with this -- my site uses canvas / ExplorerCanvas quite a lot -- ExplorerCanvas is both buggy and extremely slow for any kind of animation. Particularly long running animation (as in games). I wish it wasn't so. VML may or may not perform well, but it's a different kind of api than canvas. In VML, like SVG, you're intended to draw a bunch of shapes and then manipulate them. To animate a circle crossing the screen, you draw the circle and the move it every tick. The library manages the redraws, etc. With canvas, you redraw every frame. So, to animate that circle you draw it in a different position every tick. If you run canvas on top of VML you end up redrawing a lot of extra elements which get reinserted into the dom at every step. They're just fundamentally different approaches and the impedance mismatch kills ExplorerCanvas's performance. If this has changed recently, btw, I'd love to hear about it!
- jasonkester 18y ago
  Yes. At least that's what I've observed in my attempts to get Firefox up to speed in Twiddla. Here's a benchmark that you can run to compare for yourself: http://www.twiddla.com/demo/rendering-performance-canvas.html http://www.twiddla.com/demo/rendering-performance-canvas.htm... On my machine, IE will render 170 boxes per second. Firefox bogs noticeably after a couple seconds and finishes at around 60 boxes per second total.

emilam 18y ago

I'll try to let the author of the article know. I was sharing this article and I am not the author of the article.

jasonkester 18y ago

Minor correction to the above, thanks to another thread here on HN: replace SVG with VML, and IECanvas with ExplorerCanvas (excanvas.js).

Locke 18y ago

Am I reading this right? Are you actually saying ExplorerCanvas (canvas on top of VML) is faster than native canvas in firefox, webkit, etc? I have some experience with this -- my site uses canvas / ExplorerCanvas quite a lot -- ExplorerCanvas is both buggy and extremely slow for any kind of animation. Particularly long running animation (as in games). I wish it wasn't so. VML may or may not perform well, but it's a different kind of api than canvas. In VML, like SVG, you're intended to draw a bunch of shapes and then manipulate them. To animate a circle crossing the screen, you draw the circle and the move it every tick. The library manages the redraws, etc. With canvas, you redraw every frame. So, to animate that circle you draw it in a different position every tick. If you run canvas on top of VML you end up redrawing a lot of extra elements which get reinserted into the dom at every step. They're just fundamentally different approaches and the impedance mismatch kills ExplorerCanvas's performance. If this has changed recently, btw, I'd love to hear about it!

jasonkester 18y ago
Yes. At least that's what I've observed in my attempts to get Firefox up to speed in Twiddla. Here's a benchmark that you can run to compare for yourself: http://www.twiddla.com/demo/rendering-performance-canvas.html http://www.twiddla.com/demo/rendering-performance-canvas.htm... On my machine, IE will render 170 boxes per second. Firefox bogs noticeably after a couple seconds and finishes at around 60 boxes per second total.