3 ms·

This is really cool. It's completely backwards from my personal usage of the Internet; I get away with browsing online using a Penryn-era Pentium, a ARM-based

by cbhl 13y ago

This is really cool. It's completely backwards from my personal usage of the Internet; I get away with browsing online using a Penryn-era Pentium, a ARM-based Chromebook, and/or my Galaxy Nexus precisely because the majority of processing costs are offloaded on "traditional" websites rather than on the browser doing the rendering. But if this means that application developers won't have to recompile every application under the sun (like, say, ffmpeg or Audacity) to run under asm.js or PNaCl, then I think it could mean that we could skip a decade or two of having to reinvent the wheel. On the other hand, this feels suspiciously reminiscent of ActiveX, so I suspect you're going to have a hard time convincing people to adopt it if the security diehards warn you of running arbitrary code on your machine (even if it is in a sandbox).

rsync 13y ago
"the majority of processing costs are offloaded on "traditional" websites rather than on the browser doing the rendering" I have not found this to be the case. I find that most websites take a LOT of processing power to display - loaded with flash, scripts, video, etc. A lot of sites are not really guilty as it is the ad network content inline with the site that pulls all of that computing power, but other sites (boingboing, for instance) generate a lot of CPU use just on their own. And it gets worse all the time. I suspect that whatever gains we make with efficiency of HTML5, etc., will be immediately consumed by things like the OP is building. I have a 5 year old macbook air that absolutely does not need to be replaced. Except that I can't have more than 10-12 browser windows open before it's pinwheel city...
- cbhl 13y ago
  With the devices I've used, I find that flash content loads and runs just fine provided that there's at most one running on each page and it doesn't crash. Granted, I find myself enabling Adblock by default on most sites because most ads nowadays are annoying Flash pop-overs. Back in the day, the Linux implementation of Flash didn't support making the Flash embed transparent, so I had to go into Firebug/Web Inspector and delete the embed/object tags entirely just to read the page. While I think that particular bug has been fixed, even today, most of the Chrome tab crashes I run into are still caused by Flash crashing. It really bothers me how much stuff depends on Flash still, whether it's putting something in the clipboard from the browser, or just Google Hangouts or Facebook deciding to play a "ping!" when a notification goes off. The only thing "HTML5" means to me is that my ARM devices can offload H.264 video decoding to the GPU, rather than trying to run a cross-compiled Sorenson decoder on the (relatively underpowered) CPU. Everything else under the "HTML5" banner seems to be just increasingly complicated browser-specific extensions to JavaScript and/or CSS. I've also noticed that the Chromebook and Chrome for Android will deallocate tabs that I haven't used recently and reload them when I switch to them, which lets me have dozens of tabs "open" on devices which are otherwise only capable of handling three or four tabs at once. Of course, this is only reasonable because of "high speed internet"; I remember being on dial-up in the late 90s running Internet Explorer 4 and opening ten windows in the background so that the pages would pre-load in the background while I read the current page.

by cbhl 13y ago

rsync 13y ago

"the majority of processing costs are offloaded on "traditional" websites rather than on the browser doing the rendering" I have not found this to be the case. I find that most websites take a LOT of processing power to display - loaded with flash, scripts, video, etc. A lot of sites are not really guilty as it is the ad network content inline with the site that pulls all of that computing power, but other sites (boingboing, for instance) generate a lot of CPU use just on their own. And it gets worse all the time. I suspect that whatever gains we make with efficiency of HTML5, etc., will be immediately consumed by things like the OP is building. I have a 5 year old macbook air that absolutely does not need to be replaced. Except that I can't have more than 10-12 browser windows open before it's pinwheel city...

cbhl 13y ago
With the devices I've used, I find that flash content loads and runs just fine provided that there's at most one running on each page and it doesn't crash. Granted, I find myself enabling Adblock by default on most sites because most ads nowadays are annoying Flash pop-overs. Back in the day, the Linux implementation of Flash didn't support making the Flash embed transparent, so I had to go into Firebug/Web Inspector and delete the embed/object tags entirely just to read the page. While I think that particular bug has been fixed, even today, most of the Chrome tab crashes I run into are still caused by Flash crashing. It really bothers me how much stuff depends on Flash still, whether it's putting something in the clipboard from the browser, or just Google Hangouts or Facebook deciding to play a "ping!" when a notification goes off. The only thing "HTML5" means to me is that my ARM devices can offload H.264 video decoding to the GPU, rather than trying to run a cross-compiled Sorenson decoder on the (relatively underpowered) CPU. Everything else under the "HTML5" banner seems to be just increasingly complicated browser-specific extensions to JavaScript and/or CSS. I've also noticed that the Chromebook and Chrome for Android will deallocate tabs that I haven't used recently and reload them when I switch to them, which lets me have dozens of tabs "open" on devices which are otherwise only capable of handling three or four tabs at once. Of course, this is only reasonable because of "high speed internet"; I remember being on dial-up in the late 90s running Internet Explorer 4 and opening ten windows in the background so that the pages would pre-load in the background while I read the current page.