Andres (Employee) over 3 years ago:
"We have no plans to make a browser based version, we feel we can provide a much better product with an app and offer features which wouldn't be possible via a web browser."
Today, webapps are the most spread apps, as they work the same across devices (cross platform).
Three years ago, it would be difficult to build Spotify for browsers, because it would require APIs that you could not simply access from JavaScript. Today, with HTML5, APIs exists for:
- Bi-directional secure (TLS) WebSockets with UTF8 or binary
- Native audio playback
- A whole new types of input types such as "search" and "range"
- 2D Canvas Context for advanced dynamic drawing of 2D elements (lines, gradients, text, images, shapes, raw pixels)
- Realtime audio processing/analysis with the Web Audio API
- Sandboxed FileSystem access (e.g. for offline playlists, local settings)
- Application Cache for offline usage of the app
- Drag & Drop API (e.g. for dragging tracks to playlists)
- History API for sessions and bookmarking
- Binary data: Typed arrays/ArrayBuffer, Blobs and File API (for reading files, writing files)!
- XHR2: Binary data with Ajax/XHR requests
- WebWorkers, multithreaded JavaScript
- CSS3: Keyframe animations, smooth transitions, shadows, custom fonts, new selectors.
- PeerConnection API for Peer-To-Peer connections!!
Today, Google Chrome (the world's second largest browser) got all of these APIs and more (except WebRTC, but it's in the dev build, so it will soon be here too). Chrome even have it's own built-in appstore (Chrome Web Store) where users can install extension/apps, without having to restart their browser.
Another approach to get Spotify to the web is to use Native Client (NaCl) to compile C/C++ code for the web. An example is the game Bastion that was compiled with NaCl to run in Chrome.
This would be the easiest way for the Spotify developers, as they only had to tweak their code very little to make it compile with NaCl.
( Offtopic: I made a chrome extension for Spotify, which convert spotify links to links with mouseover info, for example image of the album, artist name, title of track, popularity. Get it HERE. Thank you :] )
Hello folks!
Now you can try our brand new web player at spotify.com
The web player will be a bonus if you can’t - or don’t want to - download our app. So whether you’re at the office, or round at a friend’s house, simply log in to your account and hit play. You can play the entire Spotify catalogue directly from any supported web browser. Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer are all included. The web player is available to all users, whether you’re Free, Unlimited or Premium.
Enjoy it!