A game inside a favicon. | Hacker News Reader

A game inside a favicon.

p01.org

118 pointschaosmachine12 comments

Wow, that's simultaneously the most innovative and useless thing I've seen in days.

>[a game in a favicon is] the most innovative and useless thing I've seen in days

This will now be used for advertising in 3..2..1.

Seriously, this is going to be used to make alert favicons and such that interact with the webpage showing if a file has downloaded/uploaded or a message is sent or any other action has been completed or is being requested, etc. Number of messages waiting in your online email, that sort of thing.

The actual implementation may be useless but as a proof of concept it seems good.

When I saw the article about changing the favicon for Google Calendar to the actual date, I tried to write a game in the favicon at that point.

Unfortunately, it didn't work for me on Chrome 6 (linux). It would update once, and then refuse to update again. (No error, just didn't change.)

I'm happy to see that's not the case on Chrome 7 now. I'll probably revisit that little project.

Works in Chrome 9.0.576.0 dev.

In case it's not immediately obvious, you can "play" the favicon. Unfortunately, it only seems to work in Firefox and Opera (no Chrome, Safari, or IE).

"Press N to start a game or shoot, and WASD or the arrow keys to move your Defender over the humanoid city. If your browser struggles to update the favicon, press enter to toggle between favicon & canvas display."

Actually, it works for me here in Chrome 8.

Works in Chrome 7 (current stable) too.

Works in Chrome 7 on OSX here.

It's incredibly slow in Chrome 9 unless I'm in the canvas display.

Works on Chrome 8 on OSX here, but not Safari. (Both work in canvas mode just fine though)

Even in canvas mode, my eyes started blurring after just 1 wave though -.-

Works pretty well on Chrome 7.0.517.44

Unfortunately playing a game on a 16X16 canvas is not so entertaining for those of us who's eyesight is a little bit weak...

We need bigger favicons.

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