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Running Pong in 240 browser tabs

by pr337h4m on 2/20/25, 7:33 PM with 31 comments

  • by eieio on 2/20/25, 10:48 PM

    ah hi! I made this! was wondering if this one would appeal to the HN crowd :)

    Happy to answer any questions! And here are a couple of scattered thoughts:

        * I'm really interested in what this looks like if you use animations (firefox supports animated favicons) - I could, for example, anticipate future ball positions and create animated SVGs to get a much nicer framerate.
    * A friend pointed out offline that canvas rasterization (typically) is on the GPU, which is probably why my performance intuitions with my stuttering animation were so wrong
    * I am only moderately confident that chrome caps favicon updates to 4 a second; I know there are a lot of different ways to update favicons and I could have missed something here!

  • by rhgraysonii on 2/20/25, 10:41 PM

    I attended Nolen's recent talk at Recurse, and these absolutely mad but fundamentally funny and cool games as one-shots are so delightful.

    It reminds me of the older internet, when people would make things just to be silly and have fun. I had some fun last night inspired by some of the stuff he has been posting making a very funny kind-of-quine that outputs its own source code of the page showing it, via BEAM decompilation and some other tricks. I wish I had the time to crank out things like this, and it makes me smile to know that there are people out there creating things in this manner that will just keep things interesting for all of us.

    The piece that gets the sort-of quine is here, if anyone wants a laugh https://github.com/notactuallytreyanastasio/blog/blob/main/l...

  • by smithcoin on 2/20/25, 10:31 PM

    Love anything made by Nolen. To me it seems like he’s hitting the sweet spot of developing single purpose apps/sites that give me nostalgia for what the internet used to be like.

  • by dejawu on 2/21/25, 6:11 AM

    A similar exploration by Matthew Rayfield using the URL bar instead of tab favicons: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7GtCLwTmV4

  • by kvemkon on 2/21/25, 2:38 PM

    Reminds me of:

    * "Show HN: I saw this mind-blowing experiment, so I made a simple version of it" (25.11.2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38413660

    * "Synchronize a 3D scene across multiple windows using Three.js and localStorage" (27.11.2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38437773

  • by LonelyWolfe on 2/20/25, 10:39 PM

    I'm calling it - Doom is next.

  • by capitainenemo on 2/22/25, 10:04 PM

    WRT firefox and narrower tabs. You can still inspect the browser in firefox, and find the style rule for min tab width, then add it to userChrome.css

    There's a few guides out there on this, and I'm sure someone has done one for tab width already.

    Maybe that's cheating though. (there's also browser.tabs.tabMinWidth but I think it still forces a minimum unfortunately)

  • by luma on 2/20/25, 9:31 PM

    Delightfully absurd, A+ effort!

  • by wedocharlie on 2/20/25, 9:30 PM

    The band "Ok Go" did a collaboration music video with google chrome once that had some really amazing synchronization of browser windows with dancers, and kaleidoscope like effects... This reminded me of that.

  • by sho_hn on 2/20/25, 11:03 PM

    Doom port in days.

  • by ge96 on 2/20/25, 10:13 PM

    really cool, I like how modifiable Chrome can be, looks like this one uses websockets but you can use an extension for tab communication too

  • by fitsumbelay on 2/21/25, 6:57 AM

    impressive as always

  • by qingcharles on 2/20/25, 10:38 PM

  • by aqueueaqueue on 2/21/25, 12:03 AM

    Checkboxes now tabs. Always finding a novel place to get those coveted pixels

  • by nektro on 2/21/25, 5:32 AM

    now this is the kind of thing HN was made to showcase. excellent work friend ^.^