Quake II Ported to HTML5 Browser

A lot of attention lately has been put on the capabilities of HTML5 sites, since the iPad doesn’t support Flash. It turns out to not matter much because most companies have had no trouble to switching to HTML5 supported online video platforms. But what about other things that Flash does well, like games? Turns out that HTML5 might be a more powerful game engine than most people think.

To show off the possibilities of HTML5, some engineers on the Google Web Toolkit team created an HTML5 port of the classic first-person shooter game Quake II. You can check it out in the video below. It is based on an open-sourced Java port of Quake called Jake2.

A post on the Google Code blog explains exactly how they managed to port the game over:

We started with the existing Jake2 Java port of the Quake II engine, then used the Google Web Toolkit (along with WebGL, WebSockets, and a lot of refactoring) to cross-compile it into Javascript. You can see the results in the video above — we were honestly a bit surprised when we saw it pushing over 30 frames per second on our laptops (your mileage may vary)!

The HTML5 game works on “modern browsers such as Safari and Chrome.” If you have had a chance to try it out, let us know what you think.

Microsoft Shows Off Revamped Internet Explorer 9

Microsoft has made some big announcements this year at the MIX10, first the Windows Phone 7 Series development, and now Microsoft gave programmers, web developers, and the world at large a taste of things to come with its new and improved Internet Explorer 9 web browser.

As per Microsoft, IE 9 stays competitive by supporting several HTML 5 specifications including CSS3, Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), XHTML parsing, and both embedded H.264/MPEG4 video and MP3/AAC audio. It also includes a new and improved JavaScript engine that combined with its GPU-accelerated graphics promises to deliver a rich browsing experience.

Microsoft has also confirmed that IE9 will not support Windows XP, but the preview Microsoft is showing off plays nice with Vista SP2 and higher.

You can test drive the latest browser via an online demo over at Microsoft’s new IE9 website or, you can download and install the Internet Explorer 9 platform preview.

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Opera Mini Headed To iPhone Soon

With a recent announcement of Opera Mini's release for Android Market, all the iPhone users were feeling left out. Since then the, Norwegian web browser developer Opera has revealed that the company's mobile browser application for the iPhone is just "weeks" away from submission to the AppStore for approval.

According to sources, the new Opera Mini iPhone app was likely to be six times faster than iPhone's native Mobile Safari web browser.

Speaking about the development at the South By Southwest festival at Austin, Opera spokesperson Thomas Ford said, "I can't positively say the time frame, but I can say it's very soon", indicating that it would realistically take a few weeks.

Opera had given a preview of their upcoming iPhone application at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last month. As we had noted back then, the server side processing coupled with caching of compressed binary format files made the rendered webpages nearly 90% smaller and hence provided much shorter page loading times.

However, it is unclear if Apple shall approve Opera's application. Though Opera insists that the company is hopeful that their app shall be accepted into the AppStore as they believe that they're following Apple's rules.

What do you think? Will Opera Mobile iPhone app make it to the AppStore?

Opera Mini 5 Beta hits Android Market [Video and Download]

Android users got a treat from Opera Browser to the new Opera Mini 5 (their lightweight client-server browser) which is available to download in the Android Market.  The new Opera Mini 5 has received a makeover and now closely resembles Opera Mobile 10.

Here is the official statement we received from Opera:

“Android is an open platform for JAVA (Dalvik) applications. Native applications, like Opera Mobile 10, can use only features published as part of the NDK that is currently made for a narrow class of applications, mainly applications that are made in Java but uses some native code to do CPU intensive tasks. Opera Mobile is an application implemented fully in native code, and currently dependent on direct access to standard Linux libraries (not available from the NDK).”

Top new features of Opera Mini 5 include:

• Tabbed browsing – Browse several Web sites at the same time, while easily jumping from one to another.
• Speed Dial – Get to your favorite Web page with just one click, with a set of visual bookmarks when you open a new tab.
• Opera Link – Synchronize your bookmarks and Speed Dial between your mobile phone and desktop computer.
• Download manager – Manage downloads right from the browser. Pause and resume downloads to suit your needs.

Opera Mini 5 can be downloaded for free by pointing your phone at http://m.opera.com/next.