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by openbasic 2728 days ago
One does not simply develop cross-browser. Different browsers have different issues with different graphics cards. As soon as you're not drawing a textured triangle anymore, things get hairy. Same for the audio API. And don't get me started on the sad state of WebRTC and websockets.
2 comments
beetwenty 2728 days ago
Yes, it's just not viable to develop for browsers unless you have the maintenance budget for a moving target. I decided on that after living through the Flash era and trying HTML5 for a little while. The browser is backwards compatible only for certain kinds of applications.
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rafaelvasco 2728 days ago
Well, yeah. I agree. You escape from several problems in native environments and find another several in the web.
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openbasic 2728 days ago
That's the thing. You don't escape from those problems in native environments. You still have to deal with different GFX drivers doing different crap on different platforms, cards that they that support a GL extension but don't, etc. And that's just OpenGL.

With the browser, you're just adding another abstraction layer that has even more complexity. WebGL is far for a decent spec. And we're talking just graphics, as I mentioned before, audio and networking have tons of unstable and untested code.

Multimedia programming is already hard on native environments. I don't see the web being a friendly environment anytime soon. There's no silver bullet, "code once, run anywhere" for games and multimedia.

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