Hacker News Reader

Comment by moocow01 | Hacker News Reader

I feel a little bit mixed being that Google seems to be using this to market Chrome.

I have the latest version of Firefox and Safari and Google is informing me that I need a modern browser to experience it, which actually seems to just be Chrome.

Seems pretty passive aggressive.

View on HN

Thing is, sound support (WebAudio or HTML5 <audio> alone) is not a priority for most browsers, Firefox included. I like that Google is so aggressive - maybe some of the other browser vendors will begin to care.

I ranted about the <audio> element quite a while ago[1] and many points are still valid. Also, <audio> can't be used for "dynamic" sound at all. Chrome's/Safari's WebAudio is the way to and Mozilla agrees, but hasn't done anything implementation wise.

[1] http://www.phoboslab.org/log/2011/03/the-state-of-html5-audi...

Thing is, the .com.au version worked fine in Safari this morning, but the .co.uk version tells me I need a more modern browser this afternoon.

So it's not just being limited to browsers that are technically capable of running it.

Which is fine of course. But if you already test features a la modernizr then use that power for good and tell me that my browser (which is very modern, thank you very much) lacks support for X, maybe 'audio'.

It's the words I'm annoyed by, not the fact that it doesn't work. Chrome is crap in my world (entirely subjective opinion) and branding it as the only 'modern' piece of kit is.. just the same.

Does Safari have a WebAudio implementation? I'd understood that it's Chrome only.

And hasn't Mozilla had its own WebAudio implementation since FF4?

    https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Introducing_the_Audio_API_Extension

Agree. Google nuked Firefox is what really just happened. It was really fun, while Google was using its home page powers to mock IE for missing features, but I am on Firefox Beta Update channel and they tell me to "upgrade to a modern browser". It is disappointing.

They are as bad as Microsoft now. Microsoft used to show the "upgrade to a modern browser" banners to everyone. At least now they can actually say it's modern, before it was linking to IE8.

Firefox 12.0 on Linux here.

It works fine but at the bottom...same message.

I gave my monitor the middle finger.

It also seems pretty much bullshit, I opened the page in chrome and the doodle doesn't seem to do anything but link to the "Bob Moog" search in either browser.

Funny enough, it worked perfectly in Firefox 12.0 and was nothing but an image in Chrome 16.0. After upgrading to 19 it worked equally well. Shows how much I use Chrome I guess.

Funny, it actually doesn't work for me on chrome but does on FF

It works fine in Opera, for once.

I have firefox 12 (release) on Windows and it works fine.

On the right, you can play and record compositions.

When I tried opening someone's saved song in Firefox, the Play button did nothing. But it worked in Chrome.

At least playing my own records works. I don't have a link to someone elses so I can't test it. They seem to have slightly changed the player though, from the last time I checked. There was no arrow pointing at the keys for instance.

Adding to my previous: it works _and_ there is no upgrade notification.

It didn't work for me on Chrome, and it worked fine on FireFox. I have version 19m.

Ironically on my shitty HP Windows XP machine at work it is working better (but not perfect, especially multitrack playing) on Firefox than Chrome (sound stuttering).

I believe it falls back to Flash if you don't have the appropriate browser audio API. It should still work but supposedly not as responsively/accurately. (I haven't tested this myself.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com