I was recently working on a Flash game that ran great in every browser except IE. In IE8 it ran really slowly. We had to figure out what was going on because IE is the 800lb gorilla of browsers.

We found and fixed the problem. It turned out that the cause was running the Flash object with hardware acceleration enabled in the browser settings in the HTML embed tag – but only in IE. The weird thing is- having hardware acceleration enabled should have made the game run *faster*. Of the browsers, it *drastically reduced performance* only when running in IE. It didn’t affect the game in other browsers Chrome or Firefox. It’s hard to tell exactly why it ran slowly on IE. It could be something in IE or it could be something with the Flash Player. Since the game ran fine on Chrome and Firefox even with the setting enabled, it’s fair to guess the slowdown is something in IE.

So then we got into some discussions about Silverlight and HTML5 and other competitors of Flash content on the web. Well I knew a little about Silverlight (proprietary) and knew very little about HTML5 so I watched this video from May 2009 Google I/O. HTML5 looks sort of interesting [video]. There are a few demo videos out there of HTML5 showing off some pretty decent 3D graphics. Also, for web apps it looks interesting in how it could simplify HTML.

The problem that seems to be persistent through the years in the browser wars (now the platform wars) is the lack of incentive for cooperation from the various vendors to adhere to a new standard. Personally, I think it’s unlikely to have the ones with largest market share cooperate unless they are driving the change- and with HTML5 as far as I know they are not driving the change.

For a small game company making web games, it might be a better idea to go with technology that lets you create your product at some level in the pipeline where the browsers are cooperative. For web games, the most pervasive option is still Flash, although several new platforms have launched that do not support Flash at all. An additional issue is that IE8 can now run it slowly in some situations with some settings. Flash is still so pervasive on the web it might not really matter yet. In most Flash games, I think running with hardware acceleration turned off is not that big of an issue. If you need hardware acceleration, another alternative that might keep you out of the browser wars is to go with something like Unity. It’s a 3D engine that has a web player, can make standalone apps, and has a version that can build for iPhone. Here’s a link [http://www.unity3d.com] if you want to check it out.