You can install the new Angry Birds for the web as an app in Google’s Chrome browser, or just play from the URL, chrome.angrybirds.com, which works just fine in any modern web browser. Just don’t hit that link if you’re planning to get any work done today.

Behind the scenes, the web incarnation of Angry Birds is powered primarily by HTML5. However, if you happen to have ditched Flash, you’ll notice that Angry Birds on the web won’t work.

What’s interesting is that the offending code appears to use gwt-voices, a cross-browser audio shim from Google. In theory gwt-voice only falls back to Flash when needed, but using the Aurora release of Firefox brings up a “You need to install Flash Player” message for Angry Birds (most likely because Firefox does not ship with mp3 support).

Calling Angry Birds an HTML5 app, is, in that regard, somewhat of a stretch.

Still, the primary rendering and logic of the game does use HTML5 elements like canvas, and HTML5 APIs like localStorage. The latter is interesting because it makes Angry Birds on the web hackable.

As per Rovio’s releases on other platforms, Angry Birds for the web offers in-app purchases for additional playing levels. But because Angry Birds uses the localStorage API, a clever dose of JavaScript will, at the time of writing, unlock the extra levels sans payment.

Welcome to the web, Angry Birds, where everything is hackable.

Chris Milk, the director behind last year’s experiment, The Wilderness Downtown, which featured music by Arcade Fire, is back with a new interactive film, this time in conjunction with Danger Mouse. The new 3 Dreams of Black film/experiment is based on a song from Danger Mouse’s new album Rome, written with Italian composer Daniele Luppi and featuring Jack White and Norah Jones.

Head on over to the Rome website to check it out. While WebGL works just fine in Firefox, Chrome and Opera, in our testing 3 Dreams of Black was smoothest in the latest stable version of Chrome.

Unlike The Wilderness Downtown, which took some input (the address of the house where you grew up) and then created a customized, but static, experience, 3 Dreams of Black is considerably more interactive. At various points in the new film you can pan the camera around the scene and Google has made it possible to upload your own 3D models into the movie.

As with the previous experiment, Google has made the code available for those that would like to see how it was made. 3 Dreams of Black is entirely open source, and the project is hosted on Google Code. The code is, in the words of the developers, “a bit of a mess,” but hey, at least it’s available.

This article originally appeared in WebMonkey.

A new experimental user interface option that has landed in early pre-release builds of Chrome 13 offers a first look at what they have in mind. The browser navigation toolbar can be completely hidden, leaving only the tab bar, menu button, and content area. The forward and back buttons are moved into the tab bar, placing them in the top-left corner of the window.

To access the URL textbox, the user has to click a browser tab. This will cause a floating navigation bar interface with a URL textbox and refresh button to drop down from the tab. The floating bar will remain on the screen as long as the textbox is active, but it will slide back up and disappear after a few seconds when the textbox doesn’t have focus and the cursor is out of range.

Chrome 13: They shrunk my URL bar
We tested this feature ourselves using the Canary build channel on Windows. The feature isn’t yet supported on Mac OS X. It’s obviously still very experimental and isn’t configured out of the box. To test the new hidden navigation bar, you have to enable the feature from the about:flags panel and then toggle it from the tab context menu.

This new streamlined navigation bar obviously poses some phishing risks, because it doesn’t make the domain and SSL status of the current site easily visible to users. It’s important to remember, however, that it’s still at an early stage of development is only being made available as an option rather than a default.

This article originally appeared on Ars Technica.