from Hacker News

WebGL 2.0 Achieves Pervasive Support from All Major Web Browsers

by nkjoep on 2/17/22, 8:41 AM with 100 comments

  • by skywal_l on 2/17/22, 12:04 PM

    To be clear, this article is triggered by the fact that Safari, the only major browser that did not support WebGL2, has landed support a few months ago.

    This was the major roadblock for WebGL2 acceptance of developpers looking to support all major browsers.

  • by AshleysBrain on 2/17/22, 2:20 PM

    I think Le Hoang Quyen[1] deserves a shout-out for writing the initial implementation of ANGLE's Metal backend, which is now used to power WebGL in Safari. Impressive work! It looks like they got some recognition from Google already[2], which is nice to see.

    [1] https://github.com/kakashidinho

    [2] https://lehoangquyenblog.wordpress.com/2020/09/30/google-ope...

  • by isodev on 2/17/22, 1:29 PM

    It's cool that the work Safari team did will also help Chrome improve their implementation in the future. WebGL 2 enables a lot of great experiences (especially with AR and XR now becoming more of a thing).

    "Apple adopted ANGLE as the basis for Safari’s WebGL implementation, and as a result, their engineering team spent over a year making dramatic contributions to ANGLE’s Metal backend. Safari now runs WebGL on top of Metal on recent iOS and macOS devices. Collaborative work continues among the Apple and Google engineering teams, including adopting top-of-tree ANGLE into WebKit, creating a common codebase for development going forward, and switching Chrome to use ANGLE’s Metal backend as well."

  • by ksec on 2/17/22, 2:44 PM

    Does anyone know how far away is WebGPU from finalising? Are we even half way yet?

  • by pjmlp on 2/17/22, 9:48 AM

    And still SpectorJS as the only debugging tool available, far behind native GPGPU debugging tools.

  • by teddyh on 2/17/22, 9:49 AM

  • by tgflynn on 2/17/22, 2:56 PM

    What would be a major example of something that can be done with WebGL 2.0 but not 1.0 ?

  • by marginalia_nu on 2/17/22, 11:25 AM

    So how long until someone starts mining bitcoin on my GPU whenever I visit their site?

  • by dezmou on 2/17/22, 6:46 PM

    I hope if apple took all this time it's for implement the specs correctly this time.

  • by rwmj on 2/17/22, 9:59 AM

    Seems like an attack vector that I don't need. I turned it off in Firefox (about:config -> webgl.disabled == true)

  • by danielvaughn on 2/17/22, 10:32 AM

    Why though? WebGL is already getting left behind for WebGPU.