In the end, the conclusion is that a ‘modern browser’ according to Google is a browser which sends ‘Chrome’ as its UA string and supports Flash or the Web Audio API.<p>

Can we instead on production sites standardize on something like “this site requires (experimental) features not yet present in your browser” (Thanks @getify for the idea) and a link to instructions on how they can update their browser, or if it is a browser specific feature, information about the feature and why it isn’t yet supported in their browser of choice.

It’s like this: The browser’s doomed, be­cause apps are the fu­ture. Wait! Apps are doomed be­cause HTML5 is the fu­ture. I see some­thing al­most every day say­ing one or the other. Only it’s mostly wrong.

Roughly a year ago when we summarized the state of smartphones at the Appnation conference, less than 40% of mobile subscribers in the U.S. had smartphones. Today, one in two mobile subscribers has a smartphone and that figure is moving steadily upwards.<p>

By most measures, it has been the year of the App once again, driven mostly by the rise of Android and iOS users who have more than doubled in a year and account for 88% of those who have downloaded an app in the past 30 days. In just a year, the average number of apps per smartphone has jumped 28%, from 32 apps to 41. Not only is the 2012 smartphone owner downloading more apps, they are increasingly spending more time using them vs. using the mobile web — about 10% more than last year.

Great examples of HTML5 can be hard to come by and even harder to master. It’s core aims have been to improve the language with support for the latest multimedia whilst staying readable and being consistently understood by computers. Rich Clark and Bruce Lawson take a tour around the internet to specially hand-pick the best examples of HTML5 for your inspiration.

Initially heralded as the future of browser gaming and the next step beyond the monopolised world of Flash, HTML5 has since faced criticism for being tough to code with and possessing a string of broken features.</p><p>
The coding platform, the fifth iteration of the HTML standard, was supposed to be a one stop shop for developers looking to create and distribute their game to a multitude of platforms and browsers, but things haven’t been plain sailing.

The platforms that run HTML5 faster are likely to have an advantage in running a whole new wave of applications and games. So Spaceport.io, the cross-platform mobile game development tool maker, ran a study to find out whether iOS (iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch) is faster than Android at running HTML5 games. Hands-down, iOS won.

Rarely do I find a need to call out the W3C folks (or anyone, for that matter), but the recent post by Daniel Glazman (@glazou), co-chair of the W3C CSS working group, pushed me over the edge.

In his article, he calls for everyone to, get this, stop using -webkit in their sites. He equates webkit, now a popular engine for most new mobile browsers, to IE6. Moreover, he calls it a “threat to the open web”.

<em>Seriously?</em>

Social sound sharing startup Soundcloud is switching to HTML5 for its default widget, essentially demoting its Flash widget to become a fallback solution. Soundcloud only introduced its HTML5 widget some three months ago, but a spokesperson told me today that it’s been a hit with users: “People are eight times as likely to share the sounds after playing them (with the) HTML5 widget as compared to the Flash version,” the spokesperson wrote via email.