Never Mind The Bullets: a comic strip with HTML5/CSS | Hacker News Reader

Never Mind The Bullets: a comic strip with HTML5/CSS

nevermindthebullets.com

36 pointsfolz31 comments

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.

Works smoothly on Safari on OSX, though not Chrome. Anyone know if OSX-Safari has explicit hardware acceleration? Or does it use the core libraries for display? Or is there some other trickery going on?

Competition is good but browser fragmentation is the last thing we need. Good that IE highlights one area where browsers differ, but still, I wonder if we will ever get to write once run anywhere.

Unfortunately I'm afraid some fragmentation is going to happen, though not necessarily around browser axis.

This is actually a deeper problem. It's not about standards, it's about performance.

"Old" web (where old is almost anything up to just recently) got to the point that whatever you do, can run reasonably well virtually everywhere (welcome to dream, write once, run on PC / Mac / Linux / iPhone / Android).

"New" web (what runs on nightlies / alphas / canaries) will need enough raw power for all its shininess.

Old web was seriously underusing resources on modern computers, so there was enough slack to cut / optimize away. New web is about reclaiming back this idle unused power.

If you get a terrible performance in some recent demos (and yet you see other people telling how good something runs), welcome to inequalities of new HW accelerated web.

Problems can be:

a) bad GPU drivers preventing your HW performing well (old drivers, weird manufacturer's driver versions for notebooks, not-completely-fine-tuned drivers for Linux / Mac),

b) your HW is not very powerful (netbooks, mobile devices, integrated GPUs).

This is something standards can't hide. You can have software emulation fallbacks to be compliant, but this will not really help practically, especially not on underpowered devices.

And this is in addition to performance differences coming from different browsers implementations (which may all perfectly comply with standards).

Not too different, in the end. The "Old" web was "patched" with excessive Flash, which slowed it down for many users.

I'll take the "New" web browsers over Flash, though. Better hardware acceleration (such as for large images) should've been done long ago, and Flash is a security / stability / (usually) usability nightmare.

Old web's patch is for the most part optional, if you don't want the shinies. With "new" web, what is there to disable if your hw can't handle it's stress?

Not entirely, as it's only recently that anything even remotely challenging Flash has been a viable option, and where fallbacks / functional pages without it exist frequently.

I do agree with your second point, however. Is it too much to hope that the standard JS libraries will eventually support scalable shininess?

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.

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.

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?

utterly at... fail?

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

I guess it could be because IE9 is probably built upon new APIs that came only in Vista, where Windows switched to HW accelerated windows management (which was pretty fundamental system-level change):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Display_Driver_Model

A good chunk of my 5PM today was spent trying to install Visual C++ Express.

Just try it.

It downloads, it unpacks to C:\${GUID} aaand .. nothing happens. Over and over and over again, using 3 different browsers.

Even when I try to make win32 builds of FOSS stuff just to be nice to people without compilers, MS platform actively refuses to cooperate.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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/

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.

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.

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.

Microsoft's hand in your wallet.

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.

1. What an uninspired story

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

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

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/)

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.

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.

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