HTML5 and Open Source software are the future. Even if the old guard of software development don’t want to admit, it’s an inevitability. Facebook has helped move us along towards the future of Web and the power of the mobile Web with its Ringmark tool. Now the social network is giving Ringmark to the people.
Facebook announced yesterday that they would be completely open sourcing the Ringmark tool. Previously, Ringmark had some of its core functionality, including its tests, go open source, but the entire software suite is now open source. Interesting developers can get the code on github right now. The rest of us can laugh at how our browsers still can’t pass the ring one test on rng.io.
Speaking of not being able to pass the ring one test, Facebook has changed up the actual test to add in a benchmark for drawing performance. A browser that wants to pass the ring one test must be able to animate 50 sprites at 30 frames per second. A browser that wants to pass the ring two test must be able to animate 100 sprites at 30 FPS.
One of the major problem areas right now lies in mobile browsers. They just aren’t fast enough to handle a lot of HTML5 games. Facebook, in their ongoing work with mobile, realizes this and will be implementing more tests in Ringmark soon to better test mobile browsers. Going open source also lets developers use Ringmark themselves and test for their own needs on mobile platforms.
IDC also published an infographic last month that looks at how HTML5 is evolving the mobile platform. Facebook’s Coremob community along with Ringmark has contributed to the number of HTML5 mobile developers that are pushing the Web as the next big platform.
