Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrpollo | Hacker News Reader

It is clear to me that this is a Google Chrome Experiment, from their labs, and that they did not had any intention of it working on any other browser but i got curious...

i was doing some research on it and they appear to be using sync xhr calls which causes FF to hiccup even after all this time.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=383304 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=313646

they are marked as resolved but i just confirmed the xhr sync calls dont work in some cases.

google is using the sync calls here http://www.allisnotlo.st/static/js/API.js

Here you can try this to try and play the video on FF https://gist.github.com/1109890

you will notice your console throws some errors around line 42 of that file, if anyone knows what else is wrong here please let me know.

View on HN

That would explain blocking of Firefox, but they're blocking Safari and WebKit nightly and... everything else that doesn't have "Chrome" in User-Agent string: http://yfrog.com/z/kh1rylsqj

i just tried accessing the app with Safari and it came to my attention that its trying to load mp4 and mp3 files instead of the webm videos http://yfrog.com/h7x8xup then i got even more curious and found this file http://www.allisnotlo.st/static/js/VideoList.js look around line 236

this.src = src.replace(/(\.webm+)$/, (navigator.userAgent.indexOf('Chrome/') == -1 && (navigator.userAgent.indexOf('MSIE') != -1 || navigator.userAgent.indexOf('Safari/') != -1)) ? '.mp4' : '.webm');

but looks like they didn't upload any mp4 files :( sad

None of this '90s-style sniffing is necessary: HTML5 supports multiple <source> elements allowing browser to choose and has canPlayType('video/webm') for JavaScript.

Huh? Where do you see a sync XHR in there?

there is none, my mistake

Er... there is no synchronous XHR in the snippet you pasted. All calls to open() pass true for the third parameter.

You are right, the error i get on my console isn't related to that, i misunderstood the error i get, i tried replicating today and the xhr request goes trough ok, http://yfrog.com/gysa24p makes me wonder what was my original problem, ill try to stop commenting by impulse.

this article is written with the obvious intention of bashing google, the writer didn't even do his research because honeycomb 3.2 source is available.

Where? http://source.android.com/ just says 2.3 is available, and google isn't turning up anything either.

EDIT: looks like the GPL/LGPL parts have been released (according to news reports, anyhow). Can you point me to a full buildable android 3.2 repo?

Only the GPL/LGPL parts are available, but the Honeycomb code isn't viewed as ready for public consumption yet. My guess is that we'll finally see the code when Ice Cream Sandwich rolls out.

Some openness. Waiting for corporations to deem it fit for public scrutiny but not public usage? Makes me suspicious if they released all the GPL'd parts or if they missed some.

Sure, but that was exactly what the author meant.

"this article is written with the obvious intention of bashing google" i agree, it is way faster to develop for just 1 browser, plus we should be celebrating people are trying to break ground doing this awesome videos, i can only begin to imagine all the impressive work that what went into this video, good one google +1

I hope this was sarcastic, unfortunately I fear you're actually serious.

Scary.

out of curiosity why?

Oh, okay, so that makes it okay for the site to be Chrome-only despite Google's constant proselytizing over "openness."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com