Google Music ‘About’ page is badass, works only in Chrome and Internet Explorer 9 [UPDATE: Works on other browsers too]

If you thought Google does not make enough cool looking stuff, you are in for a surprise. I recently stumbled upon The ‘About’ page for Google Music and not only do I think it is the best page Google ever made it is probably one of the coolest web pages out there on the Internet.

When you open the page, you will need to give it some time to load, which could take a while depending upon your Internet connection speed. After that you will see tabs at the bottom for the various features of Google Music. Hovering over them makes a sound that goes down in octave from left to right. But the real fun starts when you click on one of them.

Regardless of which one you click first, you will hear beats playing in the background with a cool animation on the screen. As you keep selecting more tabs a new element in the music is added and by the time you are on the fifth tab you will be hearing the complete song. At the end of the fifth tab’s description, you will get the option to play the entire song, which you can also download if you’re in the US.

This has to be the coolest implementation of HTML5 I’ve ever seen. However, it only works in Chrome and IE, with the other browsers being shown a simpler page. Even in IE, the animations and sound mixing is not perfect and is often jarring, so it is best experienced on Chrome.

So if you have Chrome, click on the source link right now and make sure to turn up the volume.

Update: Since everyone was reporting that the site is working fine on other browsers as well, I decided to do further inspection on the matter. I eventually realized why it failed to work on other browsers. I only have the Flash player plugin for Internet Explorer installed on my computer and as Chrome has its own plugin, those two were the only two browsers that could load the site correctly. After installing the Flash Player plugin for other browsers it started working fine on them too.

The funny thing is I thought the site is completely HTML5 based but turns out only the animations are using HTML5 whereas the audio is probably in Flash. This is similar to some of Google’s doodles, such as the playable guitar. This is also why simply by right clicking on the page you can’t tell if it is in Flash or not.

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