Html5 is the new craze in town. Even though the final draft is far from complete and the working specification is expected to reach W3C Candidate Recommendation in 2012, many aspects of the specifications are already stable and ready to be implementation. It it those stable specifications, which includes video, canvas, Geo-locations – to name a few – that everyone is gunning for. From Apple, who is embracing html5 video over flash; to Google who is slowly deploying html5 video to YouTube; Adobe who is adding Canvas importing option to CS5 and even Microsoft is trying to make Internet Explorer 9 a more html5 compliant browser.

As a matter of fact html5 is the one of the several selling points of IE9 (including faster JavaScript engine). So its deliciously ironic that both IE8 & 9 fails miserably on html5 test we conducted on the 5 common web browsers out there.

html5test.com is an online benchmark to test html5 compliancy of your browser. This benchmark is similar to Acid3 test which benchmark browser’s Web Standard Compliance and Sunspider which benchmark’s JavaScript performance. It is important to note that none of these benchmarks do a comprehensive benchmark of all available standards.

You can check out our JavaScript Benchmark we did earlier this year with the latest available browsers at that time. Opera surprised everyone developing the fastest JavaScript engine out there.

Benchmark done with latest public release of each browsers:

html5test HTML 5 Test: Out of possible 160

Internet Explorer continues its tradition of having horrible scores on standard compliance benchmark. They even went as far as claiming that having a good score on Acid3 test is not important to them. It will be interesting to see what IE developers at MSFT have to say now that they are trying to make IE9 more html5 compliant. Will they just brush off this benchmark scores just like they did with Acid3 or will they resort to misinformation about other popular browsers like they did with Chrome and Firefox.

Knowing Microsoft’s history, I wouldn’t be too surprised if they spend more time spreading misinformation than actually innovating their product.

So there’s still no Flash in Safari, but once Adobe hatches Flash Professional CS5 you’ll be able to port your wacky Flash games or animations out to real, live iPhone/iPod touch apps. Yep, ActionScript 3 nerds rejoice: that tasty App Store pie will soon be yours, never minding the whole plug-in debate.

This is truly quite awesome in one regard, as it lowers the barrier to entry for some app developers, and will ease the port of some cool online games that we’ve seen floating around the interwebs. Then again, if you’ve spent a little time at places like Newgrounds.com, you will quickly see the dark side to this announcement from Adobe. All those crummy Flash toys online just got one step closer to coming to life on the App Store (we’re guessing most will sell for the low, low price of $.99). At this rate there will be more apps than iPhones!

Still, back when I taught animation and game design, we had a lot of fun playing around in Flash for the powerful prototyping capabilities, if nothing else. It would have been cool to test games on the iPhone so easily. The video on Adobe’s site looks pretty cool, with them touting the “responsiveness” of apps. Yeah, unlike the slowpoke performance my kids suffer on our G4 Mac when playing Flash games, eh? I get it — when Unity 3D for iPhone came out there were problems with performance (it has matured nicely now), and any tool that exports in this way (turning an .fla into an .ipa, essentially) is bound to suffer from performance. Does anyone else find it ironic that a plug-in that was designed to make multimedia on the web lighter has become one of the most bloated? I digress.

No word on what SDK features are supported yet, but you can sign up for the demo when the beta starts. Those SDK features could be a killer, of course. If you can’t leverage some of the features on the iPhone (multi-touch, GPS, camera, etc.) these may be relegated to the Entertainment category. One other thing to note about all the CS5 applications: they will be Intel-only, Cocoa and 64-bit native.

Update: Well, lookee there, apparently some games in the store have been using this already. Did you know South Park Avatar Creator was made using Flash? Amazing.

If we all join together the world truly can be a better place!

Read the article

Testing your web application can be such a pain.  During development it is so important to constantly check how your app renders across multiple web browsers.  Doing so usually means downloading and installing Firefox, IE, Safari, Chrome and Opera onto your machine.  This works great UNLESS you need to still support IE6/7, Firefox 2 but have IE8 and Firefox 3 installed.  Ugh, now to test on those browsers you must either uninstall the newer versions and download and install the older or look in your garage and see if you have some older machine you can boot up and test on or drive to a buddy’s house you know has them or… you get my point?

Introducing Xenocode Browser Sandbox!  You can run IE8/7/6, Firefox 3/2, Chrome, Safari and Opera all from the web.  Hopefully this will help some of you reading this to speed up and make the most of your testing time.

http://www.xenocode.com/browsers/