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Comment by kenjackson | Hacker News Reader

I'd love for John Carmack to spend 18 months heads-down doing an HTML5 engine. Even if he failed to do anything incredible, the feedback would be invaluable.

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I love the fact that with mobile devices, we all get to witness Mr. Carmack doing what he does best for a second time: pushing resource-constrained devices to their limit.

No hardware acceleration on the browser just yet and still scripted canvas so that is slower.

So until WebGL, even then, OpenGL ES will still be needed for most games/interactives/apps until we hit 2GHz and about 1GB of RAM or higher.

Then things like Flash also start to perform reasonably enough, same with html5 animation. If they were hardware rendered now then they would be reasonable but still wouldn't be compared to compiled, native apps on the device. Just like desktop now only the current mobile hardware is the desktop hardware of the late 90's.

WebSocket support, canvas, svg etc is awesome for games though.

No hardware acceleration on the browser just yet

IE9 will use GPU hardware acceleration http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2010/03/16/html5-hardware...

Yep, I track all this at drawlogic.com. Firefox and Chrome also have hardware acceleration in latest. Safari has it as well but only in certain cases (Apple actually made canvas and open sourced it and it is hardware accelerated in CoreGraphics).

It will still be a couple years before this is mainstream. Where on mobile OS updates and browser updates on iOS at least are faster to be adopted (about a 6 month OS adoption rate which is much better than even browser updates on desktop).

"No hardware acceleration on the browser just yet --"

Well, Safari (including the iOS version) does support HW-accelerated CSS transitions / transforms.

Yes but still need that on canvas or svg before it will be useful in games with many sprites/vertexes.

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