Preconditions: Developing an audio player for a web application. All target browsers fully support audio tag. No need in sprites, multiple simultaneous sounds etc, just one audio track to be played back at a moment. Audio file has to be streamed from the server, not downloaded at once. Therefore not Web Audio API. Why would I want to utilize howler.js or similar library instead of relying on the built-in audio tag in this scenario? The only howler.js feature that is intriguing is “Handles edge cases and bugs across environments”.

What benefits howler.js brings for a basic audio player in comparison to `audio` element?

Preconditions:

Developing an audio player for a web application.
All target browsers fully support audio tag.
No need in sprites, multiple simultaneous sounds etc, just one audio track to be played back at a moment.
Audio file has to be streamed from the server, not downloaded at once. Therefore not Web Audio API.

Why would I want to utilize howler.js or similar library instead of relying on the built-in audio tag in this scenario?

The only howler.js feature that is intriguing is “Handles edge cases and bugs across environments”.