I tried the “Arcade Fire” demo earlier today which you can grab up here;

and I had the same experience as the guys at TechCrunch in that I first tried to view the site in IE9 and the site told me that it was “designed with Google Chrome in mind”.

I then tried the site in Chrome and it’s an interesting experiment and does quite a bit of popping open new windows from the browser and sync’ing that with things going on in other windows. Cool stuff.

I don’t quite take TechCrunch’s view about “browser wars” but I do take their opinion that, as the IE people have been saying, you have to be able to run the same markup on multiple browsers/platforms. I’ve visited quite a lot of “HTML5” sites with IE9 that tell me I’m using an [old/wrong/non-HTML5] browser and this seems to be another example.

I like this “same markup” story – I think the IE folks are right to bang on that particular drum hard.

Now, naturally, I’d have started to build this kind of demo with Silverlight in the first place and then the “same markup” idea becomes a moot point as those cross-platform differences are already abstracted for you by the runtime but then I’d have to admit that I’m a bit biased