Mozilla's new games lab opens - and there is a competition. But is it the right way to go?

And how should developers react?

Mozilla has just launched Mozilla Labs Gaming . The idea is that it is dedicated to creating games that use nothing but standard web technology - HTML 5 and CSS 3 say plus  any open additional standards necessary - open video, audio, WebGL, touch events, geolocation and fast Javascript engines.

"We want to support what the Web can do for games. The Web has been ramping up in capabilities, and we’ve been able to add all these things that have enabled a huge variety of games that couldn’t be created before."

This, of course, makes the browser the center of the gaming world and guess which browser that is likely to be? Mozilla has also just released the latest version of Firefox 4 and wants to attract developers to this "new" platform.

To add some excitement to the encouragement Mozilla also announced an international game developer competition, Game On 2010, to open at the end of September. Details of prizes haven't been announced but if Mozilla wants to make a splash then they had better be good. A more practical step would be to open an app store for web games - now that might attract some developer attention.

At the moment information is thin on the ground but Mozilla is highlighting a significant change in the web. Suddenly with HTML 5 and support for more than just text the web browser looks like a reasonable host for more advanced applications. If  you take a step back for a moment and view the bigger picture then things don't seem to fit together well. We have mobile phones running "native apps" winning out of web applications - so much so that "the web is dead" is a common heading.

What is the appropriate response? Is it to make the web browser more powerful or simply to opt for native applications in a wider context? It is clear that augmenting the web browser with additional facilities is possible but adding facilities that already exist on the desktop is a crazy stacking of operating environments. So much better to strip back the clutter and run the browser as the desktop - which is more or less what the Chrome OS is all about. Following this design means that the web and the desktop are one and all applications are native. Who needs a web-based games lab then?

Further Reading

We don't need no plug-ins! HTML 5 is enough

Silverlight better than HTML5?

HTML 5 Rocks

Introducing HTML 5

Lightbend Announces Akka 3 15/11/2024 Lightbend, the company that developed Akka, has announced Akka 3, and has changed its name to Akka. The company produces cloud-native microservices frameworks, and Akka is used for building distribute [ ... ] + Full Story

Mastering LLMs With Experts 22/10/2024 A freely available set of workshops and talks on the essentials of LLMs, taught by practitioners. The topics include Evals, Retrieval-augmented-generation (RAG), Fine-tuning etc. + Full Story

More News .NET 9 Released C23 ISO Standard Is Here But You Probably Won't Read It Go At Highest Rank Ever in TIOBE Index Apollo Adds REST APIs For GraphQL Data Wrangler Gets Copilot Integration JetBrains Makes WebStorm and Rider Free for Non-Commercial Use Remembering Thomas Kurtz, Co-creator of BASIC Rare Computer History Memorabilia Being Auctioned By Bonhams IBM Updates Granite Models IBM Opensources AI Agents For GitHub Issues Google Updates Responsible AI Toolkit Improved Code Completion With JetBrains Mellum Ai-Da's Portrait of Alan Turing At Auction

<ASIN:0596806027>

<ASIN:0672330970>

<ASIN:1430228741>

<ASIN:1430227907>

<ASIN:0240813286>

<ASIN:0321719913>