It looked cool, but the video was chugging from time to time and the sound was hiccuping quite a bit. It was a little better when I tried it full screen.
I updated video drivers (for a Nvidia Quadro 3800) and did a clean reboot. Second time around worked better, though the framerate on the video would dip still from time to time. Watching Task Manager, there were moments CPU usage was close to 90%, usually when the map was zooming in or out. I'm guessing my video drivers might have been out of date enough to not accelerate Silverlight 4 causing it to hit the limits of the CPU.
It is a good job Apple didn't recently get up to anything like that recently, like releasing a load of HTML5 demos that sniffed for the user agent to stop other HTML5 capable browsers from running them
Yeah, stopping other browsers from even trying was a bit odd. The main difference though is Apple isn't calling out other browsers with those demos, trying to paint them in a negative light. They just talk about Safari (on the desktop and on the iProducts).
But yeah, I'd never attempt to defend Microsoft's marketing people. I never forgave them for tacking .Net on the name of all their server products that had nothing to do with .Net, just so everything looked pretty. Idiots.
Agreed. At least they backed off on releasing Windows .Net Server, and renamed it to 2003 before release.
And then marketing gets involved with a page like
this, and their good old "must crush competition by digging up FUD" spirit is right there again.
When I first looked at that page, like you I thought "good old FUD". However when looking back again, I'm not sure it is quite that simple.
If we assume for a moment that those test cases aren't just lies and they really do test tricky bits of those standards then that set of pages, complete with interactive test cases, is actually quite a useful thing for the browser community.
Of course the fact that IE9 passes all the tests makes it look very bad.
If only they had also released the test cases that they no doubt have that IE9 (and probably some/all of the other browsers) doesn't yet pass.
I'm curious, do Google and Apple make their test suites (or parts of them) public ?
Most of the info for Safari (and the underlying WebKit) is public, at either webkit.org, or developer.apple.com/safari. They are even quite candid on the WebKit blog at times, showing Webkit failing tests while in development. I remember them showing progress on Acid 3 regularly until it hit 100/100(something IE 9 still fails horribly). I'm not certain about Google or Mozilla though, but I assume they are also similarly open with both the good and bad. I'll have to dig up specific test cases, I know they are out there somewhere, but can't find them in a quick search before calling it a day at work.
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