* Note that this was written in late 2009 and info might be out of date, if you have questions about browser compatibility or similar, just ask in a comment below *

To put it short,
- just don’t use Internet Explorer.

Below I sum up some info about the different
browsers and specifics about using Mad Tea Lab.
Most strange behavior has to do with lacking support for data urls,
my guess is that data-urls are just not used enough to get good coverage during testing.

Firefox 3.5.5

Firefox is the browser I use the most for Mad Tea Lab testing. It is fast enough and compatible, and if you mess up by doing an eternal loop or similar, the last url is stored and recovered when you restart Firefox. Seems to be somewhat slower when the menus for Reference/Examples are open.

To save the graph area as PNG you can just press right mousebutton and choose “Save Image As…”

To export a wav file, first push the export button. Firefox will open and play the sound in a new browser window, you need to click the icon to the left of the url, and then choose “More Information…” and then click the “Media”-tab, and then “Save As…”

If you’re working with sound, the new html 5 Audio Tag works great in Firefox (And then you can then save the sound easily by right-clicking the audio-tag-gui)

Chrome 3.0.195.33

Chrome is the fastest one, and has nice and fast mouse/keyboard input too. It’s also safe in the way that you can just close the tab if it locks up, the rest of the browser is unaffected. The big drawback is the export options, I don’t know why, but it’s not possible to save data-urls in chrome. Chrome also has some minor canvas drawing flaws, probably caused by an optimization (so if you need speed, it might be a feature).

You can export a PNG image to a new window, however, the option “Save As…” is disabled, but you can use drag n drop to save it to disk.

For SVG-Export, you have to shift-click the SVG-export icon and then copy the text into a text editor and then save it as svg

Sound export to binary WAV is not possible as far as I know (please let me know if you find a way to do it!).

Opera 10.1

Opera speed is good too, but mouse input is queued in a way that makes working with low update rates quite hard. Opera is the best when it comes to png and svg export, here data urls work exactly as expected. Opera has its own WAV player, and it’s faster than using the quicktime plugin in other browsers. The drawback is that Operas player doesn’t have a interface, so you cannot replay the file without regenerating it. (By the way, the quicktime plugin seems to be the de facto standard for mimetype “audio/x-wav” fot most users, it this correct?) One small thing that annoys me is that Opera always show the horisontal and vertical sliders on textareas, even when empty.

Sound export to binary WAV is not possible as far as I know (please let me know if you find a way to do it!).

Safari 4.0.4

I did not get Quicktime to work the last time I tested in latest Safari/OSX (maybe they have just dropped the data-url support?). However, now the html 5 Audio Tag works, but exporting sound to a binary file does not seem possible. Safari has some canvas drawing flaws.

Safari 3.0.4

Mad Tea Lab works quite fine on older Safari versions with the exception for png export. HTML 5 Audio Tag does not work.

iPhone

Mad Tea Lab basically runs fine on an iPhone too, but when I tested I found no way to click and drag, which makes it hard to use zoom and pan-position for the graph / sliders for the variables)

Internet Explorer 8.0.6001

In theory, Internet Explorer is supported, drawing is handled through excanvas. However, in practice it is too slow for some of the stuff you can do with Mad Tea Lab, for the example a julia fractal animation, IE will give you less than 1 frame per second. Sound does not work, nor does any other data-url exporting. Also there are a number of layouting issues…

IE limits URL lengths to 2083 characters, so you have to keep your labs below that size.