Wrath of the browsers

Almost half a year has passed since my initial HTML5 performance test. Most browsers have seen various updates and Construct 2 has improved a lot for sure. Time to give this another whirl.

The good news is that the average fps count has risen from a measly 27.6 to 39.8, which means a considerable improvement of 44,2%. Not bad at all.

Let's have a look at the cold hard facts:

Apple's Safari gives quite the phoenix out of the ashes performance and rises from a non-existent framerate the last time to the bronze medal, beating Firefox by 4 fps. While the Mozilla browser can improve and is about one third faster than it was with version 4.0, I still hoped for Firefox to make the leap to the top this time.

Clash of the browsers

In the light of the recent Firefox 4 release, I decided to get all my browsers updated to the most recent version and give it a whirl with some Construct created HTML5 goodness. I used the sun example again, which serves as a relatively hefty benchmark I guess. There are objects being constantly created, destroyed, resized and the additive effect is being used after all.

Let's take a look at the FPS ranking of the different browsers:

1. Internet Explorer 9.0.8112.16421        54 FPS
2. Google Chrome 10.0.648.204             38 FPS
3. Firefox 4.0                                        24 FPS
4. Opera 11.01                                      22 FPS
5. Firefox 3.6.16                                   14 FPS
6. Safari 5.04                                        Freeze!

To my surprise IE 9 pretty much wiped the floor with the competition I have to say! It even has a big margin over the often praised Chrome browser, which still easily secures a good second place. 

Can you do that with HTML5?

I have already been babbling about what Construct 2 is capable of doing in its current state. Now in the light of the previous post, where I demonstrated a way to create a sun effect, I was wondering... could this be done already in C2?

Let's have a look at a list of features/objects I have been using for that sun in Construct 1:

- sprite object

- gradient object

- additive effect

- color filter

- distort map

- hash table object
- delta time 
- while loop
- rotation behavior
- global variables

Green color means it is already available in C2, red colored features are only available in C1. That doesn't look too promising to be honest. But let's give it a quick shot anyway!