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Comment by adatta02 | Hacker News Reader

the obvious problem is that it's going to take a generation of browsers before everyone has native <canvas> support along with a respectable Javascript engine.

IE6 market share is still 17% with IE7 at ~25% (source: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp)

I can't imagine advanced Processing/JS is going to run well without native canvas and SpiderMonkey/V8/Squirrelfish

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Since those are the stats for w3schools.com itself, I assume they are biased quite strongly towards web developers. For a more inclusive picture, try this:

http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-ww-daily-20080701...

I particularly like how uniform the IE6 line is, suggesting a large percentage of the users are office-bound.

Also, have a look at Excanvas, which takes advantage of IE6's reasonable VML support to emulate the <canvas> tag. Quite impressive for such an old browser.

Yes, IE6 (60%) and 7 (20%) make up 80%(!) of the browsers in business (Forrester research, April 30th 2009, http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Web-Services-Web-20-and-SOA/Microso...)

But the JavaScript voodoo to "upgrade" IE6 is getting better and better.

Also note the periodicity of the Firefox and IE curves -- looks like a lot of people use IE6 during the week and Firefox during the weekend.

Great point, this is still very much a "the future is here, but not widely distributed yet" moment, but such great geek eye candy.

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