

Never Mind The Bullets: a comic strip with HTML5/CSS - folz
http://www.nevermindthebullets.com/


======
bd
I just ran it through usual menagerie of browsers (Win7 - CH, FF, SF, OP, IE)
and Chrome was the only one with really bad performance (surprisingly even on
HW accelerated canary build).

It's quite refreshing to see MS guys pointing out performance bottlenecks in
Google's code :).

Competition is good.

With IE9 MS managed to find one area where virtually all other browsers sucked
(large / many / transparent image sprites), made a good implementation and
created some clever demos that benefit from this implementation.

This may have hastened coming of HW acceleration to upcoming public releases
of Chrome and Firefox.

Kudos for IE team for stepping up the game.

~~~
seancron
I tried it out with Chromium 7.0.533.0 on Ubuntu 10.04, with the hardware
acceleration disabled. It seemed to me that it became sluggish only when the
text bubbles were on the screen, which admittedly was most of the time. It
could handle the images fine, but for some reason it seemed to have trouble
with the text. It'd be interesting to know why this is.

I'm going to try it again with the hardware acceleration enabled this time to
see how much of a difference it makes.

Edit: So with hardware acceleration enabled, it was smoother but still a
little laggy. It also used up more of the CPU.

------
d0m
Ok, so I said to myself: Fine, let's download ie9, check it out and look at
that demo page. So I google it up, I see the ie9 test drive.. Then, where is
the [DOWNLOAD IE9 BETA] button? I can't see it.. so I google again: ie9
DOWNLOAD.. same page, no download.

Finally, reading a bit everywhere, I see a: Download beta9 now. Good.. I click
on it. And I see: [Since you're running Windows XP, you won't be able to
install Internet Explorer 9 unless you upgrade to a more recent version of
Windows.]

So you know what? Fuck you, I stick with My XP/Mac and Chrome.

~~~
Groxx
Huh. Wonder why they're not putting it on XP. Is it just that they don't want
to support it, or are they using IE9 as the carrot-on-a-stick that (IMO)
DirectX 10 utterly failed at?

~~~
bitslayer
utterly at... fail?

~~~
Groxx
Heh, oops. Hit undo once too many times. Fixed :)

------
StavrosK
Okay, someone answer me this:

Is this comic _so_ standards compliant that it _only_ runs well on IE9?
Because, if so, this is a special breed of irony.

~~~
traskjd
It's always been ironic - like people saying you should use Chrome/FF over IE
because they were standards compliant... and yet only 30% of the market.
Saying just because they were better browsers was fine, but standards don't
really sell browsers :-)

There is a clear difference between a formal standard and a defacto standard
and Microsoft is the king of owning defacto standards.

------
oconnore
My first thought was "what trickery did they pull to make this only run well
on IE9?"

~~~
apike
IE9 has GPU acceleration features that haven't shipped in the other browsers
yet. I know Chrome is most of the way to shipping something competitive, but
I'm not sure about the others.

~~~
ergo98
Firefox 4b6 has hardware acceleration and comparable performance on Windows.
Both of them are in beta.

------
lenni
Runs slow in Safari too. I dislike MS as much as the next guy but I guess you
can't really berate them for trying. I'm fairly impressed by their release
strategy and marketing. To be precise, I'm impressed that they started doing
those things.

------
Kilimanjaro
Kudos to Roman Cortes for his ingenious work that I believe inspired this and
many other works.

<http://www.romancortes.com/blog/css-3d-meninas/>

<http://www.romancortes.com/blog/3d-meninas-explained/>

------
dmoney
It's nifty, but I've never looked at web comics and thought "I wish they could
parallax scroll."

I think it would be better if you could drag to move the frame. I don't like
it auto-following my mouse. It was also a little choppy in firefox on windows.

------
finemann
Its sluggish in Chromium 7.0.535.0 (Linux) but better in Chrome (Linux).
Firefox did the job a lil' better than both Chromium and Chrome (although
there is no reason for this!). Opera 10 (Linux) was the best.

~~~
ascuttlefish
Opera 10.62 in linux gives me this error:

Based on your current browser, you are not seeing all that this website has to
offer. For the best 'Never Mind the Bullets' experience, we recommend you
install Internet Explorer 9.

Seems to work okay otherwise, but I wonder what, if anything, I am missing.

~~~
gvb
Microsoft's hand in your wallet.

------
hebejebelus
This seems to have worked almost perfectly in the current Webkit nightly for
me, and I think it's really a stellar example of what can be done with
browsers. Now we just need one of the comic book giants like Marvel or DC (or
even a smaller publishing house) to "publish" a few pages of issues in this
format. I'm sure sales would go up dramatically.

I would really love to know just how long it took to make this, though,
regardless of the actual artwork (the html-ification of it), because the time
it takes probably isn't viable for my webcomic utopia.

------
alanh
1\. What an uninspired story

2\. This submission is a duplicate:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1715295>

------
alxp
From an accessibility perspective, having the text available to a screen
reader is a very good thing. Hope this becomes commonplace for web comics.

------
zachinglis
This really annoyed me because it's not HTML5 that is powering most of this
technology nor is it something that could not be accomplished on HTML4.

(I wrote a post about it. <http://zachinglis.com/2010/html5-is-not-that-
powerful/>)

~~~
lukestevens
Yes, it's frustrating how this is being passed around uncritically as an
example of the wonder of "HTML5", when it really just demonstrates you can do
some fun things with plain old JavaScript, with all the inherent problems and
arguably worse performance than Flash. It's also pretty grating to see "CSS3
Multi-background" being listed as a "feature" of HTML5.

Nice bit of marketing for IE9, though.

------
hackermom
Works smoothly in Safari 5 on OS X. However, the various images that move
around in each frame of the comic strip as you move the mouse around are,
depending on how you hover with the mouse, completely off and move almost
randomly, ripping the frame apart (f.e. being able to move the whisky glass
around on the table, up in the air and off the table, and being able to rip
the cowboy's arm off of his torso). I later found that this is the case on all
browsers except IE9 - I am willing to bet that this is because IE9 is still
broken.

