I'm currently consider implement an application using actionscript 3. Minimum browser requirement is important to me because I can't assume most of my user will equipped with modern browser. I tried to google around the browser requirement for running actionscript, but didn't found something quite useful. Any hints?
ActionScript is not executed by the browser, it is executed by the Flash Player, notably player version 9 or higher for ActionScript 3.
As far as browser compatibility for the Flash Player, here are the Adobe specs for minimum Flash Player requirements: http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/tech-specs.html. Note that those are the specs for version 11, and they require IE7 or higher - but if you are targeting Flash Player 9 (minimum for AS3), then you can easily run on IE6 and all other major browsers.
Overall, it's not something I'd be concerned with. Flash Player has been supported by all major browsers for quite a long time. Other than mobile browsers (phones and tablets), you'd be hard-pressed to find a desktop browser that doesn't support it (as long as the end user chooses to install the player, that is).
Related
Safari (version 5.1.7) on Windows 10 does not support html video and audio, but works well with same version on Windows 7, so you have to use flash to play html media in this case. This seems like quite a drawback or I am missing something. Is there a way around it?
http://jsfiddle.net/jxajbo6f/2/
var testEl = document.createElement( "video" ),
if ( testEl.canPlayType )
The number of users using safari on Windows 10 is going to be fairly small - Safari version less than 6 have less than 0.5% of total market share across all OS's according to this market share site for example:
https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=2&qpcustomd=0&qpct=3&qpcustomb=
It could still be important for you, however, if you have a target audience or organisation that do need to use it for some reason.
The problem is that the HTML5 video standards and extensions keep evolving so a browser not being developed, as Alexander points out above, simply cannot maintain compatibility.
In addition to this the OS itself has been updated and may provide new or different mechanisms to playback videos, for example leveraging HW acceleration and allowing for DRM, and only limited support may be offered for older interfaces. Falling back to Flash looks like your best alternative if you really have to support this use case.
Two and a half years ago Adobe announced that FlashPlayer 10 would support color correction. Admittedly the implementation was really basic because it would always assume all content to be sRGB encoded and would convert that content to the current display profile in use on the system. This was the introduction blog post by John Nack.
All AS3 needed to activate this feature is:
stage.colorCorrection = ColorCorrection.ON;
...and yes you do need stage access for this to work and no that is not the problem.
So back when it was new I wrote a little wrapper to display images in Internet Explorer and Chrome so that they would render correctly for folks with extended gamut displays and also used this in a flash based video player with the same purpose.
Revisiting either today I find that what I know to have worked no longer does. What changed in the meantime is FlashPlayer's version and most likely the browser versions, too. I tried OS X, Win 7, Win XP, icc v2 and icc v4 display profiles on all of these, different browser versions, flash player versions to no avail.
You'll say that I must have done something wrong but the example page Adobe published a while later and which I lknow to have worked for sure also fails nowadays. If you look at the Flash applet you'll find it saying:
stage.colorCorrectionSupport: unsupported
If it sais supported for your system please comment the OS, browser and version and FlashPlayer version. Otherwise I'm looking for any clues to what happened to this feature.
At least the Adobe staff participating on their boards seems to be clueless. Quote: Because this feature seems to be disabled by default in most major browsers, I'm thinking that it was an experimental web standard proposal that died or something. We're not doing a whole lot here, it's mostly dependent on the browsers passing us the right data and doing the right color conversion math. We're pretty far down the chain of events.
I know for a fact that this worked at some point of FlashPlayer's evolution. So the following might help in solving what's going on:
does the Adobe example still work for anyone caring to look?
if this were about a deprecated browser feature why doesn't it work on old browsers anymore?
did it stop working on any particular FlashPlayer? (I tried several but could no longer make it work)
Notes:
color correction did not work with wmode transparent for some reason (but opaque was fine)
color correction originally also sometimes failed when using alpha bleding transitions
UPDATE: The feature still seems to work when wmode is set to "window". Of course that is very limiting. If you have a lightbox etc. on a page the Flash content will always stay on top of it etc. - so that's bad.
With wmode="window" the example also worked for me on OSX 10.6 (only version I tested thus far) and Win XP 32 bit. It still failed with all win 64 bit versions I tried but those systems have multiple screens so maybe I'll have to retry with a single screen since the first comment below suggests it worked on Win 7 64.
On the systems this worked I tried Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer and Chrome. All worked the same except that when using Chrome the built-in Flash player always gives stage.colorCorrectionSupport: unsupported while disabeling the built-in FP and using the system's Flash player works as in the other browsers.
So the questions above can be narrowed to why does this no longer work for any other wmode especially "opaque" - which did work before and which is what Adobe uses in their on-line version of the sample file...
UPDATE 2: Flash Player's newer wmodes "gpu" and "direct" make the feature fail on the systems / browsers named above where wmode "window" worked out.
UPDATE 3: After finding the wmode = "window" angle I decided to post a follow-up on the Adobe forum I quoted from initially. That lead to this whole issue being acknowledged as a bug in Flash player at: https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3596843 So I guess there won't be an answer to the question of what happened to stage.colorCorrection but hopefully it will sort itself out.
UPDATE 4: O.k. here is the mandatory bit of stupidity... When I said that I remembered wmode "opaque" to have worked before I errored. Upon reviewing this further I found that a long time ago I had put wmode="normal" in one of my JS files and since normal does not exist older versions of Flash Player used the standard wmode window so that was why it worked back then. More modern Flash Players have other defaults e.g. direct where color management fails and so it failed for me. So I think this never worked with any wmode other than "window" but I'm curious what the future might bring for this...
(yeah this is an old question, but I was product manager for Flash Player 10, so I thought I'd answer)
It works with window mode because Flash Player gets the rectangle in the browser and gets pretty much full control of the rendering stack and doesn't have to deal with compositing with items it doesn't know the color status of.
When you switch to something like wmode transparent, you go into a pretty crazy back and forth process compositing with the rendered elements above and below it. When you go into wmode GPU, the rendering stack is largely handed over to the GPU (not surprisingly). In both cases, Flash Player loses some control of the rendering stack and at that point things like color correction aren't possible.
The primary reason for this feature in Flash Player 10 was to enable interactive e-publishing in Flash Player (like inDesign SWF export) as well as support for applications that could help in a print-oriented tool chain.
I've been using flash video for embedded videos on my site. My old 2.2.x android plays them fine but I'm noticing a lot of new android devices as well as apple devices will not play my videos because flashplayer is fading, so I'm investigating the solution - and HTML5 video seems to be the new thing.
I've just spent 2 hours searching google and read a lot of stuff but most of it is from 1, 2, or 3 years ago -- and judging from what I've read it looks like using the html5 video tag still requires each video to be converted to multiple formats, and full screen is some sort of vendor specific extension -- different on each browser which happens to support it.
So my question is whether HTML5 video tag is a full replacement for the flash player now, or is it still a kludgiferous scheme requiring browser specific hacks for half a dozen most popular browsers -- in 2013?
Does it work on PC's, Macs, Androids, and iPhones?
caniuse.com is a great resource for pretty good data to answer this question.
As of now...
~92% of web users' browsers support the HTML video tag. The main one that doesn't is Opera Mini (about 4.5%). For those users, you can use a Flash fallback, which is actually not too much work. There are a handful of very simple solutions that will handle this for you, like videoJS, jPlayer and JWPlayer.
For now, you do need to encode in two, possibly three formats. About 92% of users support MPEG-4/h.264. Opera Mini and IE8 do not support it.
Only about 71% of users can support full-screen HTML video, so for Android and iOS (mainly), all versions, the best you can do is set the video to fill 100% of the browser window. If full-screen is that important, then you'll want to use Flash.
So, in short, yes, HTML5 video does require a little extra work, but at this point, it's not that hard to get right, and it's a standard that's moving in the direction of better stability and uniformity. YouTube, for example, uses it (with fallbacks), if that's any indication that it's ready for prime time.
Which is the browser with minimum hardware requirements with full support to HTML5?
The application should be able to play videos and perform some javascript transformations.
Windows or Linux it doesn't matter (but I bet my two cents on Linux as the winner).
Thanks in advance.
You may be putting the cart before the horse here.
There are a lot of "post pc" devices out there that have very low hardware specifications (iPod/iPad/iPhone, various Android devices, Blackberries, Windows Mobile Devices) that can run lightweight, full featured HTML5 browsers based on projects like WebKit (webkit.org).
Following browsers supports HTML5 for better client rendering especially when having flash, video streaming and mobile version of site. browsers: IE 10, Google chrome, Opera, netscape navigator.
It seems like the new "experimental" web browser in the Kindle is fairly limited in capabilities. Styling of even the included bookmarks looks a bit rough. In one video, the person mentions JavaScript being enabled in "advanced" mode but there was no demonstration of what that means. As of writing this, the product page only offers a quick paragraph about international support limitations.
What sort of web standards does the Kindle WebKit browser officially support?
Going back to Kindle firmware 3.2.x, the experimental browser absolutely supports JavaScript (ES3 spec), some CSS 2.x, and scores 55 (our of 555 possible points) on HTML5Test.com. It more or less passes the Acid3 browser test at 100%. This puts it on significantly better footing than Internet Explorer 8, other than on raw JavaScript performance benchmarks.
Strictly speaking, it is not an HTML5-capable browser despite having a non-zero score on HTML5Test.com. It doesn't support any HTML5 document features, but at the same time supports relatively advanced features like Web Workers, Cross-Document messaging, and Cross-Origin Resource Sharing.
With our Kindle 2 with International 3G, we were able to check Yahoo email, Gmail, Wikipedia, and some Maps from a remote site in Taiwan while on vacation. You can jailbreak a Kindle 2 to install the Kindle 3.x firmware. Any Kindle after the Kindle 2 can be updated to the latest 3.x firmware and have a quite functional, albeit archaic, browser compared to competing e-ink devices.
Even the very latest Kindle e-ink devices (firmware 5.8.x) only score 152 (out of 555) on HTML5Test.com, on par with Internet Explorer 9 which was 2 years behind competing browsers when it was released 6 years ago. They support some aspects of the ES5.1 JavaScript standard, but several aspects are missing/broken. It has partial support for WebSockets that makes it unusable for most web apps that use that feature, but no support for Server Sent Events which is bizarre for a device where battery life is critical. Amazon continues their history of what appears to be a purposefully broken CSS2.1 and CSS3 implementation, and the browser will hang or crash when trying popular benchmark sites like JetStream, ARES- 6, or Ringmark. One cool saving grace is the inclusion of Local Storage and Canvas support, which would make it possible to have games with decent functionality if their animations are optimized for e-ink refresh rates. The Kindle browser doesn't support web standard touch events in the browser, but there's other control possibilities a developer could employ.
That being said, even Kindle firmware 5.8.x is a decent browser on a device that has weeks-long battery life. It will reasonably render the low-end mobile (read: iOS and Android 2.x) versions of Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, and other major sites with only minor render issues. Amazon can and should provide a better web experience given the prices they charge, but in the worst case scenario the jailbreak community compensates wonderfully on the software side.
The Kindle 3 does handle Javascript but not Flash, movies or any of the other features. I have got around this with my Kindle 3 by building this website - http://www.anysubjects.com where I linked hundreds of great Kindle-friendly websites together.
I set myself the challenge of choosing only websites which were useful, and I could read without needing to change any of the settings on my Kindle, i.e. I did not need to change font size or the screen settings.
By doing this, I have built a site which does push the limits of the browser, but saves you a lot of time and frustration.