The FishIE Tank has become the most prominent example of hardware acceleration capability in modern web browsers. IE9 and IE10 dominate the benchmark with up to 1000 simulated fish. However, Google is simulating 10,000 fish. Microsoft will not be able to follow, at least not in a similar way and not right now.
FishIE Tank: 10,000 Fish in Firefox 4
Speed has always been a focus of Google in Chrome, but that focus appears to be shifting. Vice president Sundar Pichai told developers at the Google I/O conference that JavaScript is not the performance bottleneck anymore and hinted that other technologies may be much more important in the future. One of those technologies may be WebGL.
In a demonstration, Google showed the FishIE Tank demonstration with Chrome running at about 25 fps when 1000 fish were simulated. However, the demonstration went further and showed a WebGL port published by Mozilla which enable Chrome (and Firefox) to simulate up to 10,000 fish at more than 30 fps. Since IE does not support WebGL, there is currently no opportunity for Microsoft to follow – as we do not know how IE9/10 would perform with 10,000 fish in the traditional Canvas 2D version. We were not able to replicate the demonstration in the current Canary build of Chrome as our browser did not show any fish. Firefox, however, runs 10,000 fish at 30-35 fps on our test system, and 2000 fish at 60 fps.
Angry Birds, IE9 (left) and Chrome, side by side.
Google promoted the use of WebGL and presented the HTML5 version of Angry Birds as its WebGL flagship product. The game can be installed via the Chrome WebStore, but can also be run in any other modern web browser that supports HTML5 via the URL chrome.angrybirds.com. However, only Firefox 4 and Chrome run the WebGL version, while IE9 is using a Canvas 2D model. Firefox 3.6, which does not support hardware acceleration can only run the game in standard definition and not in high definition.
Angry Birds may not be the best example to highlight the capabilities of WebGL, as we were not able to see any differences in the graphics quality or performance between the WebGL and the Canvas 2D model.
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