‘HTML5 Showcase’, or ‘Safari Showcase’?

Haavard at Opera:

Apple claim to promote HTML5 and an open Web, but the page uses browser sniffing to block other browsers, vendor prefixes for the CSS3 stuff they are using (even if other browsers support border-radius it won’t work because it’s coded using -webkit-border-radius), and the patent-encumbered H.264 for video.

Can Opera do equivalent things? Is the problem that Apple has written Safari-specific demos, or is it that Apple is showing off things only Safari can do? There’s a big difference.

Update: If you go to http://developer.apple.com/safaridemos/ instead of http://www.apple.com/html5/, you can use Chrome to try the demos. Some work, but the 3D ones don’t. It still browser-sniffs to block other browsers. If you diddle with the current version of Firefox to masquerade its user agent string as Safari, two of the demos work: “Audio” and “360°”.

★ Friday, 4 June 2010