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From the “Play real games in your Web browser” files:
Playing games, real games, has always meant installing software, or running a dedicated gaming console with a CD/DVD. Sure, there are games (usually little Flash things) that can be run inside a browser, but usually the graphics aren’t up to snuff.
That could be changing thanks to an open effort spearheaded by Mozilla (yes, the same people that build Firefox).
Today at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), the Khronos Group announced a new in browser effort called “Accelerated 3D on the Web”. The Khronos Group is an industry consortium that develops open standards like OpenGL that benefits game developers and media developers alike.
The Accelerated 3D on Web working group will be chaired by Mozilla, and is an effort to develop a new royalty-free standard that could bring us cool 3D gaming graphics over the Web, direct to our Web browsers.
A key part of making the browser into a gaming platform will be the use of JavaScript to get OpenGL capabilities to users. Once upon a time, getting JavaScript to have the performance characteristics to power full 3D would have been a joke in my opinion, but it’s not a joke anymore.