BROWSER TECHNOLOGY
Browsers are one of the most used pieces of software. Behind their pared-back design, there's a lot of incredible technology that makes it possible to do some amazing things. These simple-looking applications allow us to watch, talk, interact with and learn about the world. They hide a mind-boggling amount of complexity in the process, turning the extraordinary into the ordinary in a polite, user-friendly way.
The experiments in Web Lab are all pushing the ever-widening limits of what it's possible to do in a browser and are only possible thanks to the rapidly-evolving web technologies, like those found in Chrome.
These include WebGL for amazing realtime 3D graphics; Web Sockets for realtime two way communication and advanced video streaming that allows you to see locations from across the web.
WebGL
WebGL (Web-based Graphics Library) is a software library that extends the capability of the browser to allow us to execute code on a computer display card's Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). This allows us to perform complex graphical operations in real-time to give us smooth, rich 3d interactive graphics.
Web Workers
Processing lots of data in the browser is a very intensive task. Processing too much data will slow down your browser and can cause animations and audio to skip and jerk.
Web Workers are akin to separate programs in the browser can do the heavy lifting required for animations without interuppting the users experience.
Canvas
The canvas lets developers control individual pixels in the browser. With this ability developers can create complex and beautiful animations, as well as produce compelling games all in your browser with no required plugins.
JavaScript + v8
Javascript is the software instruction set that powers each of these demos, without JS we would have to rely on 3rd party plugins.
In recent years browser makers have been constantly improving the performance of the engine that makes Javascript code tick. Chrome's v8 engine has greatly improved it's performance since its initial launch.