Looking to the Future of HTML5 Sound
Although HTML5 audio on mobile devices is in a particularly bad state, the situation on the desktop isn’t that much better. Of the current generation browsers, IE9 actually has the best performing <audio> tag support. Other browsers (Chrome in particular) actually regressed during 2011 and added new issues with <audio> tag playback. These are slowly being fixed, and the long-term outlook for game audio on HTML5 is bright.
In particular, the Web Audio API is particularly impressive. (See the spec at www.w3.org/TR/webaudio/ for more details.) However, because the Web Audio API is only available in Chrome and Safari on the desktop at this time, it will be a while before there is a performant, low-level sound API that is cross-browser supported, so it may still be for a while yet that the <audio> tag is the game engine building block of choice.
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