Initial WebGL Support Lands In WebKit

appleprophet writes "WebGL is an upcoming standard from the Khronos Group, the same standards body behind OpenCL and OpenGL ES. It defines the use of OpenGL in websites using the standard canvas element. In other words, websites will be able to render hardware accelerated, 3D graphics natively inside of a web page. In the last week, WebKit, the rendering engine behind Safari and Google Chrome, has added initial support for WebGL, which means it probably won't be too long before Macs and iPhones everywhere get OpenGL web apps. This could have big implications for gaming. HTML5 has steadily been encroaching on desktop applications' territory, but I don't think many people expected browser-based, hardware-accelerated graphics this soon."

Comments

That's a Bit Optimistic Don't You Think?

[eldavojohn]

but I don't think many people expected browser-based, hardware-accelerated graphics this soon

This is great for WebKit and I'm very interested to see where this goes. But you're kidding yourself with that above statement. Firefox is using Gecko and we all know IE will drag their feet on this. So you're proposing a company invest time into a "browser-based hardware-accelerated" graphics game or program by using WebGL ... when it's only supported on the two smallest browser shares out there? Unless there's a way to auto-port existing OpenGL code to WebGL (and the press release didn't seem to imply that), I wouldn't hold my breath. Even if tomorrow Firefox is ready to go with WebGL in Gecko, you've got a long adoption and incubation time on these projects and you'd still be targeting the minority of browsers.

Basically I don't see a good business case or success story coming out of using WebGL over OpenGL or even just dumbing down the graphics and making it something that's widely supported already like Flash. Nothing would make me happier than to see this take off and be the de facto route for putting your game on everything with a browser ... it just isn't at that point or even guaranteed to happen yet.

Re:That's a Bit Optimistic Don't You Think?

[beelsebob]

How about the browser with the biggest share of the mobile phone market - a market where you've notably got no competition from flash games?

Re:That's a Bit Optimistic Don't You Think?

[farnsworth]

If you're targeting just one phone, fine. But you might as well just use the iPhone SDK so you don't have code all the touch interaction crap from scratch. [snip] you'd be pretty darn ignorant to go with WebGL over iPhone SDK.

If you look at the trac logs for this checkin, you'll see that the commiter has an apple.com email address. So it's probably safe to say that implementing this fits in with Apple's dev tools strategy.

I don't know a lot about OpenGL or WebGL, but it does feel like it overlaps a lot with what Flash and Silverlight provide. I'm not sure what conclusion to draw from that, but it seems notable to me.

Re:To answer my own question...

[Hurricane78]

Damn. I forgot the conclusion: That Adobe might (have to) let Flash die, and create that new product based on the new faster JavaScript engines and that 3D canvas straight away.