Gaming in the Browser

Until quite recently, most games developed for the browser have used Flash. In fact, many of the popular games on Facebook still use Flash as their runtime environment. However, as mobile devices began growing their market share, Flash became a less attractive option for delivering interactive applications. Perhaps the biggest single reasons revolve around the power and memory requirements required for the Flash runtime. On a desktop machine, this goes somewhat unnoticed (although you may notice some slowdown in other applications, or your fans spinning up), but on a mobile device this is far more noticeable as it drains the battery and noticeably slows the performance of your application to make it appear sluggish. A bit of a religious battle over the use of Flash came to a head in 2010 when the late Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO at the time, commented that the iPad would not support Flash, citing security holes and its CPU load. In late 2011, this war seems to have ended as Adobe announce....