Telltale Games

MusicallyInspired · 08/10/2009, 07:39 pm

I avoid Internet Explorer like the plague.

Derwin · 08/10/2009, 07:59 pm

Quote:

Originally Posted by TheJoe

Well here it is...

It's a custom Firefox Persona made with the cover of "Everything that Happens will Happen on this Tour" by David Byrne. Mozilla won't allow me to release it.

NDA Stuff?

Quote:

Originally Posted by ShaggE

Ever see Google Chrome? There's what mine looks like.

I was about to say the same thing.

Rawr · 08/10/2009, 08:13 pm

Quote:

Originally Posted by hansschmucker

Rawr, I hate to break it to you, but MSIE really IS terribly slow. No matter how you look at it. From any point of view. And that's already taking into account that people like myself spend weeks optimizing their code so that it runs as fast as possible in MSIE, sacrificing speed on all other browsers.

I hate to break it to you, but it isn't. Infact I just tested it. Downloaded Firefox just for you guys, feel proud. I wiped my cache and made sure I used a site which I haven't been on since I reinstalled Vista, so there wasn't any of the images left on the pc which would of made the test unfair. Also used an heavily html website. Used the exact same stopwatch. Started the stop watch as soon as i pressed enter on both times. I got pretty much the same results on both browsers, 6.8seconds on Internet Explorer 8 and 6.9seconds on Firefox 3.5. So clearly, there isn't a big difference.

Ribs · 08/10/2009, 08:15 pm

And, IE was faster.

hansschmucker · 08/10/2009, 08:17 pm

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rawr

I hate to break it to you, but it isn't. Infact I just tested it. Downloaded Firefox just for you guys, feel proud. I wiped my cache and made sure I used a site which I haven't been on since I reinstalled Vista, so there wasn't any of the images left on the pc which would of made the test unfair. Also used an heavily html website. Used the exact same stopwatch. Started the stop watch as soon as i pressed enter on both times. I got pretty much the same results on both browsers, 6.8seconds on Internet Explorer 8 and 6.9seconds on Firefox 3.5. So clearly, there isn't a big difference.

Well, if you wipe the cache on both and measure the load time, then that's pretty much what you can expect (seeing as the server responses are the bottleneck here). Try to load some long files from HDD and see what happens, for example: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/

Rawr · 08/10/2009, 08:25 pm

Yes, and how many people actually load files from their HDD? The entire point of the internet is it's online. You don't save it to your hard disk to load later. You look at the web pages there and then, freshly updated. Fair enough if you're working on a webpage, then Firefox might be better, but, I'm not, and so, firefox isn't better for me. Consequently, you can't really call it crap, just because it might have a few extra features that some people might find handy. For the average internet user, Internet Explorer does the job just fine.

hansschmucker · 08/10/2009, 08:31 pm

what I'm saying is that you can't measure the speed that way... you just don't get ANY useful results.

I'd love to point you to pages that make good use of the additional speed offered by Firefox/Safari/Opera, but unfortunately any that do just don't work with MSIE's crappy rendering engine and missing features (including my own).

On any other browser we can by now render realtime 3D animations, the only reason why we can't do it on the web is because MSIE would use up all your memory, then crash.

Rawr · 08/10/2009, 08:40 pm

Perhaps you can't. But the point is it doesn't matter if the browser is "Faster" if you can't put that speed into action on the internet due to the servers. I honestly couldn't careless about the rendering engine as long as I get the page loaded up.. You guys don't seem to get that not everyone cares about the small details, not everyone is as petty as that. I'm going to say it again, since you don't quite seem to be getting the picture here. As long as it loads the internet pages at a fast speed, like it does, as shown by that test I did above, then it doesn't matter how it does it, or if the system is inferior, we don't care. It loads the pages at the same speed, and thats all that we ask for, after all, a web browsers job is to browse the web.

hansschmucker · 08/10/2009, 08:44 pm

The thing is we could do wonderful stuff on webpages, mind boggling stuff. Think 3D world, think music visualization, think games. That and much, much more.

But, we can't because MSIE is holding us back. We can't make use of the speed other browsers are offering while MSIE still exists.

The other thing is that developing MSIE compatibility costs a lot of time & money. Money we don't get from Microsoft, so we have to charge the customers for it. That and it's really quite frustrating to develop a program for 2 hours, then spend 20 getting it to work in MSIE (no, I'm not exaggerating).

Rawr · 08/10/2009, 08:55 pm

Last I checked, you can play 3d games, play music etc perfectly well in Internet Explorer using other plugins. I don't really care for internet pages with a 3d world, music visualisation or whatever. I have other programs for that. Besides, that isn't your only hold back, alot of us don't have strong enough internet connections to be able to withstand downloading that much data for just a webpage we're going to be on for a few seconds. If there really was a need for me to swap over to Firefox, I would. I don't hate the program, believe me. Just for the current things the internet offers, theres no point me swapping over yet.

Anyway, now Microsoft aren't allowed to ship Internet Explorer with Windows in Europe, you'll probably be happy to hear that you might get your wish of people not using IE anymore.

hansschmucker · 08/10/2009, 09:11 pm

Without plugins. Plugins and their little brother ActiveX are a security, accessibility and archival nightmare and should never have become mainstream. How do we expect user to make informed decisions about what to install on their system if we constantly wave "now install plugin X, then plugin Y and plugin Z (trust us, they're not evil)" type messages in their face.

Rawr · 08/10/2009, 09:20 pm

Thats quite true. Most users would probably be put off by that, infact, alot will. Although sometimes it is for the best for example with those annoying advertising plugins. Unfortunately a lot of people would install those if they were allowed to make a normal decision with it. I complain alot about stupid messages Windows gives off. Like for example when you delete a shortcut, you get an annoying message telling you that it doesn't uninstall the program. Also in the Task Manager, you get messages popping up saying "Are you sure you want to shut this program, it might loose your data, and cause an unstable system" etc. They're stupid and annoying things, but without them, people might not realise those things unfortunately.

hansschmucker · 08/10/2009, 09:39 pm

At least that we can agree on (BTW, you're surfing with an open SSL vulnerability that Microsoft hasn't fixed for half a year, making all encryption useless).

We could also bring down your bandwidth usage quite a bit if we were allowed to use the more modern standards that everybody except MSIE supports. Heck, getting rid of animated GIFs and replacing them with APNG/lossless-h264 alone would probably reduce your bandwidth bill by 10%. Not having to download 10 different versions of each transparent image because MSIE doesn't handle transparency correctly would probably bring another 10%. And creating most standard effects dynamically (like reflections) instead of downloading prerendered images may even bring in 20%.

More processing power doesn't mean more data, it means less. You can ask Yare for more details on CPU-vs-filesize

hansschmucker · 08/10/2009, 09:45 pm

BTW, if you have Firefox 3.5 installed anyway right now, here are a few little demos I've written that show off what you can do with a modern browser (they're pretty unpolished, but you'll get the idea). They could be faster with a bit of optimization, but they're already lightyears ahead of what you can do in MSIE.

Music visualization
Voxel island
Mario Kart
3D Model viewer
Dynamic texturing

Rawr · 08/11/2009, 05:40 am

Updates were made available not long after that "SSL Vulnerability" was found.

Those are nice demo's but, it makes me wonder, would we really want those in a browser. I mean Music Visualisation can already been done well by media players such as WMP(Yeah, I still use that too along side video plugins, so sue me.) and you can also have a library of your songs in those programs, allowing you to choose what ever song you want to see the visualisation for. All games, like mario kart, work fine in an .exe, so why change it, you'd also be forced to go online if you had games in your browser. As for all of the modeling, the only thing I can see that to be good for would be for game developers wanting to show off their character models or world models or whatever, and I can already see that in screenshots.

*DjNDB* · 08/11/2009, 06:10 am

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rawr

Those are nice demo's but, it makes me wonder, would we really want those in a browser

I don't know much about the demos, because i still use firefox 3.0.x until some add ons have been ported and i see a need for change, but part of the Features are HTML5 Elements which could replace proprietary and therefore problematic plugins in some places such as Flash, Real Player and Quicktime.
That kind of progress is important, because the Web needs standards and not several different approaches for the same thing.
I am worried when I see the competition between JavaFX, Silverlight and Flash. Just more junk for the Browser to handle. Although I like Java, but that's not the point.

Who knows what people come up with when the possibilities exists. Just look at AJAX. The technology has been existing for years, and suddenly, several years later, someone comes up with a way of using it that is considered a revolution for web applications.

hansschmucker · 08/11/2009, 07:57 am

The SSL vulnerability is still open in MSIE8 according to all reports I've found. If you do know otherwise, you may want to amend Microsoft's own report.

The demos are naturally just that: demos. They're not useful on their own, they just show what the technology is capable of so that when it is needed, people know that it can be done.

Rawr · 08/11/2009, 08:25 am

Oh thats a different one than I was thinking of, since you said since half a year ago, when it would seem it was actually 3months for this one. :P There have been updates recently taking care of other CVE's lately, so they aren't sitting around doing nothing I guess. But meh. Edit: just checked Sun's and other websites site, with their reports on those CVE's and apparently they meaning Firefox only fixed it a couple of days ago.

@DjNDB, You're right one day someone may find an ingenius way to incorporate those demo's into something revolutionary for webpages, but that day isn't today.

City Of Delusion · 08/11/2009, 08:44 am

Quote:

Originally Posted by hansschmucker

BTW, if you have Firefox 3.5 installed anyway right now, here are a few little demos I've written that show off what you can do with a modern browser (they're pretty unpolished, but you'll get the idea). They could be faster with a bit of optimization, but they're already lightyears ahead of what you can do in MSIE.

Music visualization
Voxel island
Mario Kart
3D Model viewer
Dynamic texturing

So, Firefox can do Mode 7 now?

hansschmucker · 08/11/2009, 08:58 am

Not the way you think

We'll have to wait for Firefox 4 until we get a true 3D API as the WebGL spec is still in its early stages. The demo you see here actually works quite differently: It uses a displacement map to transform a flat image into a perspective one (or in the case of the pseudo-voxel demo 5 displacement maps). Alternatively, you can use Canvas to implement your own rendering algorithms, but it's difficult to do textures at a similar speed, that's why the 3D model viewer demo (which is implemented via Canvas) only uses flat polygons so far.

If you want to see the current progress on the GL API, check out http://www.c3dl.org/ . You'll need Vlad's WebGL plugin ( https://people.mozilla.com/~vladimir/canvas3d/ ), which right now is only available for 3.5b4 though

08/11/2009, 08:25 am	#38
Rawr The Almighty Join Date: Jul 2009 Location: England Posts: 434	Oh thats a different one than I was thinking of, since you said since half a year ago, when it would seem it was actually 3months for this one. :P There have been updates recently taking care of other CVE's lately, so they aren't sitting around doing nothing I guess. But meh. Edit: just checked Sun's and other websites site, with their reports on those CVE's and apparently they meaning Firefox only fixed it a couple of days ago. @DjNDB, You're right one day someone may find an ingenius way to incorporate those demo's into something revolutionary for webpages, but that day isn't today. Last edited by Rawr; 08/11/2009 at 08:32 am.

08/11/2009, 08:58 am	#40
hansschmucker Senior Member Join Date: Aug 2007 Posts: 945	Not the way you think We'll have to wait for Firefox 4 until we get a true 3D API as the WebGL spec is still in its early stages. The demo you see here actually works quite differently: It uses a displacement map to transform a flat image into a perspective one (or in the case of the pseudo-voxel demo 5 displacement maps). Alternatively, you can use Canvas to implement your own rendering algorithms, but it's difficult to do textures at a similar speed, that's why the 3D model viewer demo (which is implemented via Canvas) only uses flat polygons so far. If you want to see the current progress on the GL API, check out http://www.c3dl.org/ . You'll need Vlad's WebGL plugin ( https://people.mozilla.com/~vladimir/canvas3d/ ), which right now is only available for 3.5b4 though Last edited by hansschmucker; 08/11/2009 at 09:01 am.

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08/10/2009, 08:15 pm	#24
Ribs Numberwang Quizmaster Join Date: Jan 2009 Location: Ancient Babylonia Cucumber Status: Lengthwise Yes Status: Yes Posts: 3,993	And, IE was faster.

08/10/2009, 08:25 pm	#26
Rawr The Almighty Join Date: Jul 2009 Location: England Posts: 434	Yes, and how many people actually load files from their HDD? The entire point of the internet is it's online. You don't save it to your hard disk to load later. You look at the web pages there and then, freshly updated. Fair enough if you're working on a webpage, then Firefox might be better, but, I'm not, and so, firefox isn't better for me. Consequently, you can't really call it crap, just because it might have a few extra features that some people might find handy. For the average internet user, Internet Explorer does the job just fine.

08/10/2009, 08:31 pm	#27
hansschmucker Senior Member Join Date: Aug 2007 Posts: 945	what I'm saying is that you can't measure the speed that way... you just don't get ANY useful results. I'd love to point you to pages that make good use of the additional speed offered by Firefox/Safari/Opera, but unfortunately any that do just don't work with MSIE's crappy rendering engine and missing features (including my own). On any other browser we can by now render realtime 3D animations, the only reason why we can't do it on the web is because MSIE would use up all your memory, then crash.

08/10/2009, 08:40 pm	#28
Rawr The Almighty Join Date: Jul 2009 Location: England Posts: 434	Perhaps you can't. But the point is it doesn't matter if the browser is "Faster" if you can't put that speed into action on the internet due to the servers. I honestly couldn't careless about the rendering engine as long as I get the page loaded up.. You guys don't seem to get that not everyone cares about the small details, not everyone is as petty as that. I'm going to say it again, since you don't quite seem to be getting the picture here. As long as it loads the internet pages at a fast speed, like it does, as shown by that test I did above, then it doesn't matter how it does it, or if the system is inferior, we don't care. It loads the pages at the same speed, and thats all that we ask for, after all, a web browsers job is to browse the web.

08/10/2009, 08:44 pm	#29
hansschmucker Senior Member Join Date: Aug 2007 Posts: 945	The thing is we could do wonderful stuff on webpages, mind boggling stuff. Think 3D world, think music visualization, think games. That and much, much more. But, we can't because MSIE is holding us back. We can't make use of the speed other browsers are offering while MSIE still exists. The other thing is that developing MSIE compatibility costs a lot of time & money. Money we don't get from Microsoft, so we have to charge the customers for it. That and it's really quite frustrating to develop a program for 2 hours, then spend 20 getting it to work in MSIE (no, I'm not exaggerating).

08/10/2009, 08:55 pm	#30
Rawr The Almighty Join Date: Jul 2009 Location: England Posts: 434	Last I checked, you can play 3d games, play music etc perfectly well in Internet Explorer using other plugins. I don't really care for internet pages with a 3d world, music visualisation or whatever. I have other programs for that. Besides, that isn't your only hold back, alot of us don't have strong enough internet connections to be able to withstand downloading that much data for just a webpage we're going to be on for a few seconds. If there really was a need for me to swap over to Firefox, I would. I don't hate the program, believe me. Just for the current things the internet offers, theres no point me swapping over yet. Anyway, now Microsoft aren't allowed to ship Internet Explorer with Windows in Europe, you'll probably be happy to hear that you might get your wish of people not using IE anymore.

08/10/2009, 09:11 pm	#31
hansschmucker Senior Member Join Date: Aug 2007 Posts: 945	Without plugins. Plugins and their little brother ActiveX are a security, accessibility and archival nightmare and should never have become mainstream. How do we expect user to make informed decisions about what to install on their system if we constantly wave "now install plugin X, then plugin Y and plugin Z (trust us, they're not evil)" type messages in their face.

08/10/2009, 09:20 pm	#32
Rawr The Almighty Join Date: Jul 2009 Location: England Posts: 434	Thats quite true. Most users would probably be put off by that, infact, alot will. Although sometimes it is for the best for example with those annoying advertising plugins. Unfortunately a lot of people would install those if they were allowed to make a normal decision with it. I complain alot about stupid messages Windows gives off. Like for example when you delete a shortcut, you get an annoying message telling you that it doesn't uninstall the program. Also in the Task Manager, you get messages popping up saying "Are you sure you want to shut this program, it might loose your data, and cause an unstable system" etc. They're stupid and annoying things, but without them, people might not realise those things unfortunately.

08/10/2009, 09:39 pm	#33
hansschmucker Senior Member Join Date: Aug 2007 Posts: 945	At least that we can agree on (BTW, you're surfing with an open SSL vulnerability that Microsoft hasn't fixed for half a year, making all encryption useless). We could also bring down your bandwidth usage quite a bit if we were allowed to use the more modern standards that everybody except MSIE supports. Heck, getting rid of animated GIFs and replacing them with APNG/lossless-h264 alone would probably reduce your bandwidth bill by 10%. Not having to download 10 different versions of each transparent image because MSIE doesn't handle transparency correctly would probably bring another 10%. And creating most standard effects dynamically (like reflections) instead of downloading prerendered images may even bring in 20%. More processing power doesn't mean more data, it means less. You can ask Yare for more details on CPU-vs-filesize

08/10/2009, 09:45 pm	#34
hansschmucker Senior Member Join Date: Aug 2007 Posts: 945	BTW, if you have Firefox 3.5 installed anyway right now, here are a few little demos I've written that show off what you can do with a modern browser (they're pretty unpolished, but you'll get the idea). They could be faster with a bit of optimization, but they're already lightyears ahead of what you can do in MSIE. Music visualization Voxel island Mario Kart 3D Model viewer Dynamic texturing

08/11/2009, 05:40 am	#35
Rawr The Almighty Join Date: Jul 2009 Location: England Posts: 434	Updates were made available not long after that "SSL Vulnerability" was found. Those are nice demo's but, it makes me wonder, would we really want those in a browser. I mean Music Visualisation can already been done well by media players such as WMP(Yeah, I still use that too along side video plugins, so sue me.) and you can also have a library of your songs in those programs, allowing you to choose what ever song you want to see the visualisation for. All games, like mario kart, work fine in an .exe, so why change it, you'd also be forced to go online if you had games in your browser. As for all of the modeling, the only thing I can see that to be good for would be for game developers wanting to show off their character models or world models or whatever, and I can already see that in screenshots.

08/11/2009, 07:57 am	#37
hansschmucker Senior Member Join Date: Aug 2007 Posts: 945	The SSL vulnerability is still open in MSIE8 according to all reports I've found. If you do know otherwise, you may want to amend Microsoft's own report. The demos are naturally just that: demos. They're not useful on their own, they just show what the technology is capable of so that when it is needed, people know that it can be done.