Last year we launched Chrome Experiments, a website showcasing innovative web experiments built with open standards like JavaScript and HTML5. Today we’re pleased to announce that the site now points to 100 experiments -- each one made, hosted, and submitted by programmers from around the world.

This is awesome. I saw this a while ago but I didn't realize how much new content was being added. Someone should reach out to every single one of these 100 programmers and start a new distributed digital company. Wait a second... that's a good idea.

It's also 100 more reasons to get rid of Adobe Flash... as if the poor performance and stability wasn't enough.

This is so fucking great: an HTML5 video player by Jilion with beautiful playback controls, click-to-play control over automatic buffering, full-window playback with gorgeous animated transitions, and more. Works great in Safari, MobileSafari, and Chrome; Firefox support is in the works. Oh, and if you’re using a current WebKit Nightly build: full-screen playback. Seriously, this is the real deal — full-screen H.264 playback with no Flash, no browser plugins, full iPhone OS support, and sane CPU usage, better in every single regard than any video player ever made with Flash.

Apparently Steve Jobs once said,

People think it's this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, 'Make it look good!' That's not what we think design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.

I do believe that this HTML5 video player by the good people over at Jilion is a great example of how that line of thinking can create exceptional products on the web. It's really amazing how quickly HTML5 is being pushed as a standard. The rise of WebKit on mobile devices made by Apple and Google has pretty much made HTML5 a standard overnight, at least in North America. If you have a look at this report from AdMob, you'll see why.

iPhone and Android now account for 81% of all page requests on mobile devices in the North America. The vast majority of mobile web usage now happens on HTML5-enabled devices. Once RIM releases a WebKit-based browser for the BlackBerry OS, that statistic will jump to over 91%.

For better or for worse, the W3C has become irrelevant. Apple and Google now decide what the standards are. Hopefully the open source nature of WebKit and the Chromium Project will prevent an Apple/Google oligopoly over the web that results in the kind of standards that Microsoft once imposed upon the world with Internet Explorer. Hopefully.

Today, we're excited to introduce the Google Voice web app for the iPhone and Palm WebOS devices. This HTML5 application provides you with a fast and versatile mobile experience for Google Voice because it uses the latest advancements in web technologies. For example, AppCache lets you interact with web apps without a network connection and local databases allow you to store data locally on the device, so you don't lose data even when you close the browser.

This is just the first step. Once Google fully integrates the recently acquired Gizmo Project into Google Voice, it's going to completely change VoIP in a lot of the ways Skype always hoped to. Google Voice is going to do for voice what Gmail did for email—set a new standard for how communication is supposed to operate and push the entire market forward.

We're rolling out a new beta test today: the HTML5 player!

What's the HTML5 player, you ask? Simply put, it's an alternative to our current Flash player that looks and works almost exactly the same way.

First YouTube, now Vimeo. It's only January. Mark my words, by the end of the year most of the video on the Internet will be playable without Flash. Two or three years from now we may be looking at an Internet population with a much smaller Flash install base. What will happen to rich media when it no longer has the ability to reach the majority? I don't know, but I kind of like the idea of death to rich media.

The one thing I can envision happening that would add long term viability to Flash is it being open sourced. Maybe then we'll get a Flash runtime on Mac and Linux that doesn't peg CPU utilization at 100% when watching a 480p video. Unfortunately, the codebase for the Flash runtime is probably so piss poor that it isn't even worth the time trying to optimize.

This was quite a surprise! Tobias Schneider has built a Flash runtime that works right in the browser. It's implemented in pure Javascript and HTML5, and the whole thing is open source, MIT-licensed, and hosted on GitHub.

Flash on the iPhone? Impossible? Not quite.

I'm not sure that Tobias understands the consequences of his actions. Flash is now enabled on the iPhone and any other phone that can render both JavaScript and HTML5. While the ability to render Flash is limited to simple animation and interactivity, it's enough. I'm not sure what the k-size is for the entire package, but it's safe to say that we'll start seeing sites that use this almost immediately, and possibly even rich media ads.

The coolest thing thing about is that it actually solves one of the fundamental problems of bringing Flash to the iPhone – battery life. The Flash runtime is extremely poorly optimized. On Mac OS X it consumes a tremendous amount of CPU resources. By rendering SWFs without Flash installed developers can bring animation to the mobile web without killing the already inadequate batteries of today's smart-phones.

He's calling the project "Gordon". Ah-ah! Saviour of the universe!