As long as Google exists, I can’t see them abandoning Chrome.
The problem with Internet Explorer 6 was always that Microsoft stopped developing it after achieving dominance. Internet Explorer 6 was not a bad or outdated browser when it came out, it was quite modern for its time. It only became outdated once it was abandoned.
Google’s incentives aren’t set up such that they would benefit from abandoning their browser. Google wants people to do ever more stuff on the web. Abandoning Chrome would limit the stuff people can do online. Even in the unlikely event of Google achieving total dominance in the browser market, I don’t think their incentives are set up in a way that they would ever be interested in letting Chrome become outdated.
Oh sure, should they achieve total dominance Google might be tempted to do evil stuff with that dominance. Stopping developing Chrome, however, is not one of those things.
As such the situation is not even a little bit comparable. Google achieving total dominance in the browser market might still be bad, but not for the same reasons Internet Explorer 6’s dominance was bad.
Honestly, however, I think that this is mostly a fault of Mozilla, Apple and Microsoft sometimes not getting their shit together. You can’t really blame Google.
I'm pretty sure Chrome still hasn't fixed the cleartype feature so embedded fonts look decent like they do in Firefox.
Chrome really isn't that far ahead of FF or Opera. all three are still pretty close. The only real loser here is still IE. Their paltry developer tools and IE8's incompatibility with HTML5 has pretty much doomed it to the trash bin.
Chrome has Web Audio, which is pretty far from coming to Firefox, and seems low priority[1]. That's why we keep seeing cool audio stuff posted here that's Chrome-exclusive. Firefox supports its own Audio Data API[2] which predates the W3C standard, but it's deprecated, and will never be supported by other browsers.
Web Intents[3] is another cool feature in Chrome that's not even on the map for Firefox. Instead there's a "counter-proposal" called Web Activities[4] that no one outside of Mozilla is talking about (and it seems pretty dead).
I still use Firefox, but the lack of leadership in these two cases is discouraging.
This is really cool. Only thing that confused me is the UI seems to have a mind of its own sometimes - songs suddenly change themselves, and the list scrolls, and I can't find my way back to where I was.
God, this is so much cooler than my holiday project :). Nice work.
In terms of critique, if you're interested in that, the UI could use some work (the interactions are weird, and it's not very intuitive), but once you get past that, the visualization is awesome. The UI is also quite pretty, so I think if you fine-tuned the interaction issues, it would be fantastic.
Reason I ask, I wouldn't mind contributing a feature where the user can select their own microphone input as the audio source and have the paper.js visualisation react accordingly.
No sound in Chromium on Linux (Ubuntu). Unfortunately, that often happens when I click on these experiments, due to lack of MP3 support. There is MP3.js to get around the patent issues, if Linux support is important to you: https://github.com/devongovett/mp3.js
Really nice work. Discovered some nice music, too :)
When it's on-screen is uses two whole CPUs though (one for the chrome tab, and one for Chrome's GPU-driving process) and the visualization is obviously half a beat ahead of the music. That's not your fault, but it certainly demonstrates the drawbacks of the platform.
I hate stuff that auto play music full volume on opening the page. That said, looks like an interesting experiment. I'm glad that people are using the Web Audio API, hopefully the more people use it the more browsers will support it and it will be updated.
Not OPs fault, but from the name I was expecting a web-based harmonica. Anything good online for doing GarageBand type things? Preferably that can be used in other projects?
Objective was mainly to experiment with the Web Audio API, specially its analyser. Once you plug that into a 2d/3d canvas theres really a lot of room for creativity.
Glad you liked it!
