Ricky Road: The open-source gaming community

As many people know Firefox 3 has been released recently. Whether or not you choose to use it is your business. But I can tell you it is fast. Very fast. They set out to make it fast and I can say for certain "Mission Accomplished".

Let me also preface this by saying I adore Firefox and use it as my primary browser.

Now, if you have played our version of gorillas with Firefox 3 and noticed that the banana is moving outrageously quick, we want you to know we are aware and we are doing something about it. This is our responsibility and not the browser or the plugin. We will fix it.

First some numbers. This data is from a cross section of the last 1000 sessions.
32.20% of total visitors are using Firefox.
43.30% of those Firefox users are using Firefox 3.
39.43% of those Firefox users are using Firefox 2.0.0.15. The rest is a split between the other versions

Just for the curious, IE is 51.84% of total visitors with 37.68% of those people using IE 6 and the other 73% +/- 1 are IE 7.

Basically what you see in these stats is that 13.9426% of visitors to rickyroad.com are not having a satisfactory experience. I know that people visit here to play gorillas and not so much to read articles or look at our photoshoppings. So we need to make sure that gorillas is absolutely 100% right, not 86.0574%.

The problem originates from sloppy flash code developed and released by sloppy flash coders over the years. Have you ever used a flash application and suddenly the browser stops responding? And then after a few minutes you get a message box saying a script in the flash application is not responding? Basically there is some infinite loop or just something chewing up the CPU in the flash application. Could be sloppy code or just a minor bug or whatever. Either way the browsers developers have come to expect this behavior from time to time from some flash applications. And as such they have started compensating for this. After all if firefox freezes because of a flash application it is Firefox that will usually get the blame. It is difficult at times to discern the where the problem actually exists in a tiered platform (as in OS > Network > Browser > Plugin > Application). So they only allow so much CPU time by a plugin and in doing so they do not allow it to monopolize your entire computer. They do this for all plugins, flash or otherwise.

So say you create a flash application like gorillas.bas in the Flash IDE and it runs a smooth and perfect build on your dev box. Its a glorious feeling, the sun is out the birds are chirping and your code is actually behaving like you planned. Sweet. You code in the Flash development environment(or Flash Develop which is infinitely superior) and you hit ctrl+Enter and it does a build and runs the application. But what is running the application when you do that is not the same thing that will be running the application for your users. The users will most likely be using a browser plugin. And like I said previously the plugin has limitations placed on it by the browser. Much like a governor on school bus. As in you may not use more than x% of the CPU time. So as soon as its planted in some HTML and played in a browser it can run like totally crap. The graphics are choppy and the audio is out of time with the actions. This is because of the browser throttle. But this is in YOUR best interest.

I'll explain.

This is where the sloppy code by sloppy coders comes in. Say some bloke writes an advertisement in flash. With all the bells and whistles. And it flashes obnoxious colors and tells every visitor they are the 10,000,000th visitor and offers a 50 dollar applebees card. (You know, much like the obnoxious advertising we use here at rickyroad.com). But this particular bloke is fresh out of 10th grade and his dad hired him over the summer to do "the website". And he is struggling a bit and writes an application that sometimes has an infinite loop and they can't figure out why. But its up on the website anyway. And every time you go to that site to buy auto-parts you have no choice but to run that very flash advertisement. And in doing so you sometimes have that very same infinite loop. And it endlessly does the same code operation over and over chewing up CPU and not actually producing anything of value or doing what it is intended to do. This is a bug. It's when these code demons show up that it suddenly becomes easy to appreciate that your web browser has intercepted this little bug before it intercepts your entire PC. In this particular extreme case its a very good thing. And I think that situations like this are more important to prevent than situations that could be enabled by not having the throttle to begin with. So flash developers have to do a little extra to make sure the applications do the following.

1. Don't seize up the users computer
2. Compensate for the throttle and enable a rich experience for your site visitors.

Gorillas is no exception. If you download the source and play the game in a flash desktop player it runs about 300% faster than it does in a browser.

Which brings us to Firefox 3. Firefox appears to have made some changes to this throttle/governor. I'm not sure the extent of the changes but I have noticed other flash sites having issues when Firefox 3 was first released as well (pandora). It may be that Firefox doesn't throttle at all or it has found a way to allow more CPU to the plugins and still intercept them if there is a seize up. Which, if it is the latter that is great. It's the best of both worlds.

So you know this isn't simply conjecture, read this. Head to this site in Firefox and then open it in any other browser.

So back to our situation and how it applies to us. Above all we just want players to know we are aware of it and it sucks. We will get it fixed shortly. And the source will be updated with these changes. Until then I encourage you to try Safari or Opera 9.5

Thank you for playing and thank you for visiting rickyroad.

FYI the applebees giftcard is always a lie. Ask my dad.