Thushan Fernando Uncut

The title says it all. Using the Jake2 port of Quake II (to Java) the bright sparks at Google have used GWT to bring Quake II to HTML 5.

We started with the existing Jake2 Java port of the Quake II engine, then used the Google Web Toolkit (along with WebGL, WebSockets, and a lot of refactoring) to cross-compile it into Javascript. You can see the results in the video above — we were honestly a bit surprised when we saw it pushing over 30 frames per second on our laptops (your mileage may vary)!

At first I thought it was an April fools joke, but as cruel as that may be, it wasn’t. Download the source and give it ago, I nearly fell of my chair.

At the moment you have to build from source and mess about a bit, but fear not, I followed the guide on OSNews by Kroc on our MacBook Pro and it worked quite well, yet to try it on Linux.

The moment we’ve all been waiting for, Mozilla has released the final version of Firefox 3.5 (which was originally slated to be 3.1). Amongst the highlights include the new Gecko 1.9.1 rendering engine and (from their release notes):

• Available in more than 70 languages. (Get your local version!)
• Support for the HTML5 <video> and <audio> elements including native support for Ogg Theora encoded video and Vorbis encoded audio. (Try it here!)
• Improved tools for controlling your private data, including a Private Browsing Mode.
• Better web application performance using the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.
• The ability to share your location with websites using Location Aware Browsing. (Try it here!)
• Support for native JSON, and web worker threads.
• Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.
• Support for new web technologies such as: downloadable fonts, CSS media queries, new transformations and properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 local storage and offline application storage, <canvas> text, ICC profiles, and SVG transforms.

For the developers, the Mozilla developer centre details the changes in this release. But the most exciting is the support for <video> and <audio> elements from the HTML 5 draft and the inclusion of the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.

Download it now!