Monthly Archives: May 2010

Google’s pacman doodle in Epiphany/Midori?

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Google has had a very nice idea today, to celebrate Pacman’s aniversary: they made their logo become a playable HTML5 pacman. If you’re wondering why your WebKitGTK+ browser is not being able to play the game here’s why: Google is doing User-Agent sniffing and denying you the fun, sending a static image that you can click to perform a search instead of the game.

If you make Epiphany or Midori identify themselves as Chrome or Firefox, the game will work. I really don’t get this User Agent sniffing bullshit coming from Google. If you go to gconf-editor, and under epiphany->general set the user_agent key to “Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux; en-gb; rv:1.9.0.2) Gecko/2008092313 Firefox/3.8″ it works. I’m starting to seriously consider User Agent spoofing for *.google.com as a quirk on WebKitGTK+. Lame.

Update: as a protest, I’m making blog.kov.eti.br and kov.eti.br say Chrome/Chromium are not supported, by doing User Agent sniffing.
Update2: it’s been pointed out to me that the game is not HTML5 – it’s actually smart usage of divs, and flash *urgh* for the audio
Update3: thanks to a friend who works at Google getting in touch with pacman’s designer, it looks like it now works without faking U-A – I’m happy for this, thank you! Despite this good step forward, google is still denying us the nice fade in effect, and still sees us as ‘unsupported’ in Wave and similar products, so I’ll keep my protest for now.

WebKitGTK+ and WebM

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So you probably heard about WebM, right? It’s the awesome new media format being pushed by Google and a large number of partners, including Collabora, following the release of the VP8 video codec free of royalties and patents, along with a Free Software implementation.

It turns out that if you are a user or developer of applications that use the GStreamer framework, you can start taking advantage of all that freedom right away! Collabora Multimedia has developed, along with Entropy Wave GStreamer support for the new format, and the code has already landed in the public repositories, and is already being packaged for some distributions.

I just couldn’t wait the few days it will take for the support to be properly landed in Debian unstable, so I went ahead and downloaded all of the current packages from the pkg-gstreamer svn repository, built everything after having the libvpx-dev package installed, and went straight to a rather unknown, small video site called Youtube with my GStreamer-powered WebKitGTK+-based browser, Epiphany!:


Youtube showing a webm video in Epiphany

If you’re running Debian unstable, or any of the other distributions which will be lucky to get the new codecs, and support packages soon, you should be able to get this working out of the box real soon now. Check the tips on WebM’s web site on how to find WebM videos on youtube.