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by tete 5360 days ago
The Quake Engine has been running inside browsers for ages.

Also if you speak about portability. Flash really isn't very portable when you compare it with the platforms supported by Webkit. Flash has always been a huge mess when it comes to this. Webkit and Gecko are pretty much up to date, but many people hardcode browser checks instead of just asking whether the browser supports certain stuff. I think that's the biggest problem - well, besides the market share of outdated IE versions of course.

1 comments

What portability. I mean, Web Audio API is supported by only Chrome and Safari (so that's not "webkit". Sure Flash ain't better. But hey! None of this is standardized.

And why should Gecko support Web Audio API? You see, they got Web Audio Data instead. Not compatible of course. None are standard.

So flash does beat them and HTML5 on that very topic.

The Gecko API is very basic, it just gives you access to sample buffers in Javascript, so everything must be processed in Javascript.

The Web Audio API is a much more fleshed out API, built on the higher level audio APIs used in professional sound apps. You can use it to process raw buffers, but you can also use it sequence and compose many effects on audio buffers with very low latency timing requirements without having to write time critical javascript DSP code and hope for the best that no delays or scheduling skew creep in.