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Comment by coda_ | Hacker News Reader

it's cause they are using flash for audio if not IE9 or greater (as in IE10). you can force html5 audio instead of flash audio using this link:

http://www.cuttherope.ie/?html5audio=true

Let me know if that works.

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no it doesn't. with flashblock it's 00% all the time (ff)

With the link he provided and that override, the site doesn't prompt me to load Flash at all.

Yeah, the html5audio option doesn't seem to work in Firefox with Flash disabled.

Aw, too bad. They must be aware they're blocking browsers that support it if they have that override. But yes, that does work for me. (*Edit: it appears audio is [at worst] broken in Chrome stable according to the dev blog for this project).

Yup, doesn't even try to load Flash at all now, great!

Chrome is the only browser to support the Web Audio API (which isn't fully standardised yet anyway I don't think), but that is an amazing API for audio, and is far better than HTML5 audio.

Mozilla supports the Audio Data API which predates Chromes entry into that space: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Audio_Data_API At some point this will be battled out in the W3C and a standard API will appear.

The two don't compare at all. The Audio Data API simply allows you to write custom sample data to audio buffers. The Web Audio API is a complete audio routing/processing graph complete with all the features you'd expect of a good audio engine. The Audio Data API is pretty useless for games compared to the Web Audio API.

The Audio Data API is terribly low level, and the current implementation in Firefox is so laggy that it's not an option for real-time game audio. Chrome's Web Audio should win this battle without a sweat.

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