You can get slightly excited about HTML 5 these days. His Jobsness says that it will replace Adobe Flash. Microsoft has built an entirely new, hardware accelerated browser with the hope that HTML 5 will create a richer Internet and benchmarks such as Futuremark’s Peacekeeper already include stunning graphics and animations based on HTML 5 that run right in your browser. But it is Google that has released a first silly game that runs, despite the fact that Chrome has been dissed as trailing IE9 and Firefox 4, best in Chrome.

The game was posted by Paul Truong, who works as Creative Technologist and Creative Team Lead for Google. The story isn’t overwhelming – you need to fly a Gmail envelope through space and unlock other tiny mails that are locked in a cage. The game is more a proof of concept and a showcase that HTML5 already runs in today’s browsers.

Don’t set too high standards when you run the game. We were not able to get smooth graphics and gameplay on a decent quad-core PC. It was rather rough and if this was the game that would have to convince you to switch from Flash to HTML 5, it would fail. However, the point Google makes is that Flash-like games will be running natively in our browsers in the not too distant future. It is worth noting that the game does not run in Microsoft’s IE9 PP4 as PP4 does not support HTML 5’s canvas element. That may be the case when the first Beta is released next month.

Firefox 4 Beta 3 works with the game, but we have seen the best performance with the Chrome 6 Beta, which, curiously, is the most advanced browser as far as HTML 5 support is concerned, but is generally perceived as the worst HTML 5 browser since Microsoft has begun promoting IE9’s HTML 5 hardware acceleration support.

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