
IE10 review: still disappointing for HTML5 games - AshleysBrain
https://www.scirra.com/blog/103/ie10-review-still-disappointing-for-html5-games
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CJefferson
This benchmark is a bit misleading, as it is not comparing like with like.

On the only benchmark where WebGL doesn't help, IE 10 does respectably. I have
found in my limited testing of 2d canvas that IE 10 performs quite well.

While it would be nice to see WebGL in IE10, 2d canvas-based apps perform very
well.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Until recently I recall seeing some canvas apps performing much smoother in
IE9/IE10 than in Chrome.

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megaman821
I agree with respect to games Chrome and Firefox are pulling ahead, but with
respect to publishing IE10 is ahead. Things like grid layout, positioned
floats, and regions are awesome to more easily make good looking websites.
While I do enjoy games, I would rather Chrome and Firefox work on adopting
these new css primitives more than working on OpenGL and audio APIs.

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bluetidepro
Is anyone really _THAT_ surprised, though? I feel like indie game developers
who are using HTML5 techniques still mainly target modern browsers ( _Chrome,
Safari, and Firefox_ ). There might have been a hope of say "it will be
awesome if everything starts to work on IE", but I highly doubt those
developers were dying for IE. Plus, if you look at the majority target market
for HTML5 gamers, those users will most likely be using modern browsers
anyways.

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meaty
I thought IE10 was a "modern browser"?

~~~
tokenizer
Not according to this: <http://html5test.com/results/desktop.html>. BUT, IE
will start to auto update their browsers here sometime soon, and in my books
that's what makes a browser modern right now.

~~~
Zr40
The score for IE10 is 320. It's close to Safari 5.1, the previous version of
Safari, which scores 319.

Of course, it's not as high as the current leader (Maxthon 3.4.5 at 457), but
IE10's got a decent score, and is definitely a big improvement compared to
IE9.

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kevingadd
Disappointing, perhaps, but somehow it still manages to be better than Opera
and Safari (Windows Safari, at least) for HTML5 games based on my testing [1].
Going from last place to third place in such a short time period is an
achievement in my book, even if I'd still never use IE as my primary browser.

Admittedly IE10 is still missing some features I would mark as important for
game development, but when I contacted some IE devs over at Microsoft (just
send an email!) they got back to me with simple workarounds that made it
possible to get my games running with a few lines of additional code. (Not IE-
specific code either, just clever feature-detection fallback for _any_
browser.)

Here's how I suggest looking at it instead: Holy shit, the browser that comes
_stock_ on Windows 8 can _actually run a large majority of HTML5 games and
applications!_ You don't have to nag people to install Chrome or Firefox just
to use your app! Sure, you want them to upgrade anyway - and they probably
will - but that's something!

Now if IE11 comes out and doesn't advance the state of things here I'll
certainly be disappointed, but at present I'd say I'm actually quite pleased:
in the jump from 9 to 10 MS has brought IE forward enough that you can run
HTML5 games in it without having to write a ton of browser-specific hacks or
feature implementations.

WebGL support would be nice, but you still can't rely on WebGL in HTML5 games
anyway since it doesn't work on a large percentage of desktop machines and is
basically unusable on mobile. I think this is another area where the pressure
should be on MS to get a rock solid implementation of WebGL into IE11, not to
complain about IE10 not having an API that is arguably still not ready for
prime time (Though increasingly close).

Complaints about not having the Web Audio API are similarly missing the point
since _you can't use it anyway_ unless you're writing a Chrome Experiment -
your real complaints should be reserved for the fact that IE still has an
undocumented limit on the number of live <audio> instances you can put in a
single page, or for IE's latency when playing new sound effects.

Finally, allow me to repeat others' comments that it's incredibly stupid to
benchmark a canvas-based game against a webgl one and present the numbers
side-by-side with a straight face. Canvas performance is _miserable_ in _every
single browser_ and IE has nothing to do with this. IE actually has one of the
better Canvas implementations out there. The fault lies with Canvas being a
poorly-specified, poorly implemented API, not with IE.

[1] I regularly test all my HTML5 game ports across the major browsers and
regularly hit crash bugs in Safari and Opera. Also, Windows Safari still can't
play back audio which is... inexplicably stupid.

~~~
davedx
Is Windows Safari still actually developed at all?

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Nope, it was silently killed.

~~~
gmac
Hmm, seems pretty irresponsible of Apple to do that, given that it's thus
going to go unpatched and its users will become progressively more vulnerable,
no?

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Apple doesn't really seem to care much about responsibility or security.

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jaipilot747
Though the comparison HAS to be between 2d canvas and WebGL due to IE not
implementing the latter, it does feel a tad unfair. Maybe someone with more
knowledge could chime in about what optimizations are possible 3D that aren't
possible on a 2D canvas.

It would also be interesting to see how FF and Chrome performed on the same 2D
canvas test.

~~~
kevingadd
It's possible to achieve a factor of 10 (perhaps even 100) better performance
for typical 2D workloads by using WebGL instead of Canvas. This is a mix of
the Canvas API specifying that things have to be rendered in a relatively
expensive fashion, and the actual Canvas implementations not being
particularly performant (despite some really impressive efforts in that area
by the browser vendors).

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dotborg
WebGL is not supported in IE because of some important reasons, it's just not
secure enough.. yet.

Most succesful games are not using it anyways.

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tantalor

      Recently Chrome and Firefox also added an experimental
      feature currently being standardised to also allow point
      sampling in their Canvas 2D renderer
    

Anybody have a source or reference for this?

~~~
AshleysBrain
I was referring to the new Canvas 2D context 'imageSmoothingEnabled' property:
[http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-
work/multipage/...](http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-
work/multipage/the-canvas-element.html#image-smoothing)

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ZeroGravitas
As with Vorbis, the lack of WebGL is political as its based on OpenGL which is
a threat to DirectX.

Theres some hope for Opus as Microsoft's Skype division is pushing it (its
partly based on Skype tech)

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proee
Can developers use IEWebGL as a fallback for IE users?

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lampe
how can be a markup language disappointing? The Interpreter in this case IE10
can only be disappointing...

