Slashdot Mirror

WebGL

From get.webgl.org:

Hmm. While your browser seems to support WebGL, it is disabled or unavailable. If possible, please ensure that you are running the latest drivers for your video card.

It turns out that WebGL requires at least OpenGL 2.0, and the Intel GMA 3150 in my laptop is stuck on OpenGL 1.4. WebGL should be fine if you know PC users will come in with at least Intel HD Graphics (the successor to GMA), if not NVIDIA or AMD graphics.

webGL can be assumed

Not necessarily. A lot of integrated graphics processors in (especially older) office PCs don't support a high enough OpenGL version for WebGL to work. For example, when I visited http://get.webgl.org/ using Firefox 32 on my laptop, it said that though the browser supports WebGL, it is currently disabled. Then I checked about:support and it said it was disabled due to unresolved driver issues. (Not exact wording because that computer isn't in front of me right now. I can retrieve the exact wording on request.) A bit more research turned up the Atom N450's HD Graphics 3100 IGP supporting only OpenGL 1.4, which was before the big reorganization of the OpenGL API to deprecate the fixed-function pipeline.

[Camera and WebGL] work just fine on my BlackBerry and FireFox OS phones.

Even if so, how many users does that cover for an app intended for use in industrialized English-speaking countries? BlackBerry is on its way out in terms of usage share, and I'm not aware of any carrier or any non-carrier electronics chain that offers Firefox OS phones in the United States. I am aware that Firefox OS developer phones are available through mail order, but how many end users in the United States, Canada, Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Ireland, Australia, or New Zealand will mail-order a Firefox OS developer phone and use it as a primary phone?

Chrome and FireFox for Android have had support for a while as well.

I have Firefox and Chrome installed on my first-generation Nexus 7 tablet running Android 4.4 KitKat. The spinning cube at http://get.webgl.org/ works in Firefox. In Chrome, however, I get "Your browser supports WebGL. You should see a spinning cube", but the cube doesn't appear.

Our long-term strategy is to make it so that nobody needs to use plugins by adding new web APIs

The illustration on the page you linked uses Silverlight as an example. Netflix uses Silverlight so that it can wrap rented videos in Microsoft's PlayReady digital restrictions management, and lack of PlayReady is why it doesn't work in Moonlight. Video on demand providers use digital restrictions management in the first place to deter users from in effect teeing a rented video into an encoder and keeping it past the rental period. How would VOD work on a browser distributed as free software without any proprietary plug-ins?

The page you linked states: "As browsers have advanced, this kind of feature development can occur directly within the browser using technologies such as WebGL" but this page, on Firefox 25.0.1 on Xubuntu 12.04 LTS on a laptop with an Atom N450, states: "Hmm. While your browser seems to support WebGL, it is disabled or unavailable. If possible, please ensure that you are running the latest drivers for your video card." A lot of users aren't in the position to buy a brand new PC just to be able to switch from Flash or native apps to web applications.

The page also mentions asm.js, but do non-Firefox web browsers, such as Chrome, Safari, and IE, support it yet? Otherwise, will have to write the program several times: once in asm.js for Firefox, once in Native Client for Chrome for PC, once as a native app for Android if the user hasn't already switched from Android Browser or Chrome to Firefox for Android, and then once as a native app for each platform that IE or Safari runs on.

and to use the mobile web as leverage to get new sites to use native HTML APIs

That won't especially help when Apple refuses to implement key HTML APIs in its iVersion of the mobile web. True, Safari for iOS can't run Flash anyway, but the idea on mobile is to get developers away from making platform-specific apps.

Quick question: Using HTML APIs, how should a web application let the user select a folder (or "directory" if you insist) on the local machine and upload all files in the folder?

With the latest JavaScript features there's no reason to be using Java in web pages anymore.

If your combination of GPU and Java plug-in supports OpenGL, but your combination of GPU and web browser gives only "Hmm. While your browser seems to support WebGL, it is disabled or unavailable. If possible, please ensure that you are running the latest drivers for your video card." with your operating system's latest drivers, then Java beats JavaScript.

I see a problem with testing entries. The article mentions an engine that relies on WebGL, but when I use Firefox 25.0.1 on Xubuntu 12.04 LTS on my laptop to try to view the first Google result for WebGL test, all I get is "Hmm. While your browser seems to support WebGL, it is disabled or unavailable. If possible, please ensure that you are running the latest drivers for your video card." The error message persists after the daily sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade. What can be done besides buying a new computer?

WebGL is fine.

From this page, Atom N450, Xubuntu 12.04, Xorg 1.11.3, Firefox 24: "Hmm. While your browser seems to support WebGL, it is disabled or unavailable. If possible, please ensure that you are running the latest drivers for your video card." This Mozilla page recommended looking in the "Additional Drivers" utility that came with the operating system, but all it showed me was the driver for a Broadcom NIC that I'm already using. The Mozilla page also referred me to Intel's driver update utility, but that's Windows-only.