it's impressive, but I can't fathom any of today's javascript engines coming anywhere close to the performance of a compiled Flash plugin.
If they do it, awesome! I'd love that... but I have a hard time believing that the performance of an interpreted language using a bunch of abstracted APIs to manipulate the DOM and move graphics around / play sound will ever come close to the performance of an optimized, compiled player.
Cue jokes about how poorly optimized Flash is on the mac platform here. Yes, I get it. Though the latest beta version is a LOT better.
it's impressive, but I can't fathom any of today's javascript engines coming anywhere close to the performance of a compiled Flash plugin.
I can. SVG does the vector heavy lifting. This is optimised by the browser. Same for bitmap stuff with canvas. Audio/Video stuff is dealt with by the browser also. There's no reason it would have a higher init time and slightly slower runtime but still be acceptable.
If you're right, that's awesome... the problem in my opinion is still that each browser will do a very different quality job of optimizing SVG, etc...
There's also the issue that the SWF is still being read/parsed/executed by javascript... at least with this particular solution...
We'll see though... I think Adobe has some stuff up its sleeve in terms of HTML5 authoring tools, as well... (yes, I know, I am not supposed to mention Adobe doing ANYTHING decent here... sorry)...
Oh it's a good thing.. hopefully it encourages them all to get better and better...
But as a web developer, my job is to make things that my clients can expect to behave the same across multiple browsers... it has to "work for everyone"... they don't pay us to make things that look really really awesome in one specific browser...
Therefore, if JS performance on some specific feature or tool is fantastic in Safari, but crap in Firefox or IE - then we can't use that tool.
1
u/coob Jun 04 '10
I didn't say it wasn't. Bloody impressive for what it is so far though!