Is there any consensus on the best browser for Glitch? Does it even matter since it's Flash based? Are there ways to optimize Flash / Browsers for smoother game play?
We get a lot of support problems from people using Chrome (proportionally more than the number of our users that use the browser which is around 25%), but others use it without a problem.
Some people on Macs swear Safari is faster than Firefox.
Firefox 4 on a Mac has some nasty key press bugs, where the Command key and even Shift and Control keys fire events that are indistinguishable from a left arrow key press.
Opera 11.10 (current stable) or you can test the Opera beta with hardware acceleration (it's what I'm using to play, world of a difference).
Opera Beta: snapshot.opera.com/labs/web...
Horrible lag with FF4 on mac, no lag with chrome but crashed a few times in a 4 hour period. Screen freezing, complete crash with FF on pc, didn't even try IE.
I use Chrome - I only had 1 crash this whole test. I will say that there was a lot of lag - but from what I was reading, many people were having trouble with lag.
@Fizio - Opera's come quite a long way. Does a lot better job of displaying pages correctly than it used to, yet retains much of its fully-customizable nature and being super-secure. It's not perfect by any means - there's still some stuff that Firefox can display properly that Opera doesn't (for instance, handling linebreaks here in these forum reply boxes), but I find Opera to be far more lightweight overall.
Since upgrading to 11.10 stable, Glitch has been running quite a bit more smoothly for me in Opera, which is a marked improvement over how Firefox renders Glitch totally unplayable for me due to how badly it hogs system resources when Glitch is running.
I might try the beta version with hardware acceleration next test. Anything to take some of the load off my poor CPU.
After a fair bit of jumping from browser to browser during this last test, I discovered that IE9 ran the smooth for the longest but only marginally so. It for the most part was the same in that it eventually bogged down as well.
I use Chrome and it *almost* never lags. Although I did find that sometimes, the area loadings take forever and my cupboard and trophy case don't open.
Have to agree with Eric - FF3 is great on Mac. Safari gives me problems with key stroke maneuvering and constant reloading. FF3 has been fast and smooth on my 13yr old mac laptop.
PC here. Running XP. FF4 == best Glitch user experience out of the three browsers I've tried. Any flavor of IE is a dog for me, and Chrome is wonderful - but only for a little while - starts bombing out from what I can only deduce are memory leaks while running Flash. FF3.6 had very near the same bad issues, but Glitch under FF4 is so much better for me right now.
I've had very few problems with chrome, but I've not yet had a chance to play for extended periods of time. Though I suppose now that I think back it seems the longer I'm in game the longer areas take to load and the more connection drops I see.
Internet explorer 9 has the best hardware acceleration so it tends to be smoother, and have higher quality graphics. For everything else I use chrome and I swear by it, but for Glitch nothing compares to IE9.
FF4 on Mac is playable on my 3 year old laptop. I have been thinking about switching to a different browser for glitch as there are sometimes huge lag spikes that make the game unplayable (Rook quest, ugggghh)
I'm having good luck with Safari 5 on my mac. FF4 works fine until it occasionally gets stuck on the loading screens between areas. Then I have to exit and come back into the world.
As a data point: my Macbook Pro was full of dust until a couple weeks ago. Glitch on Chrome with no other apps open would frequently cause my computer to overheat and crash, while playing it on Safari or Firefox would not.
Since then, I've cleaned my computer out, and I can play Glitch on all three browsers without a hitch (the only time I've seen a noticeable issue with Chrome was when doing the Rook quest). I suspect there's something about Flash + Chrome that uses a lot more CPU than Flash + other browsers. I've also noticed Chrome on the Mac crashing and having issues with other process intensive sites (most ironically, Google Docs).
One other comment is I think the Mac version of Chrome may have some memory leaks related to Flash. The longer I play, the more choppy it seems to get.
Chrome has been crashy but is my go to, I tried ie 9 and it was very slow, choppy, images wouldn't load.. Have just gone to ff4 and it seemed fastest but I haven't put enough hours in to really test its stability.
It's all-round a little more stable (no 4-second hangs), but the vanity screen doesn't shift to the left on Chrome. On a whole, it's the difference between normal play, and minor annoyances. Nothing major to me.