Slashdot Mirror
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."
While I'm sure there are some great uses for this, it also sounds like a way to serve even more resource-hungry adverts than they can with Flash. Furthermore, if this became widespread in situations not really requiring it, a decent graphics card could essentially become a requirement for web surfing.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
Why is this necessary? There are some positive uses for it (such as getting us out of dependence on proprietary technologies like Flash) but a lot more negative issues. For one, this will add even more vulnerabilities to browsers which seem to already have loads of them. And for another the web should be accessible for -everyone- from the low-end netbook to a Core i7, and even older systems should be able to browse web. Already many sites are unusable without a recent version of Flash, we don't need extra hardware as requirements to view sites. Yeah, we all know that they should do it in HTML and that will still stick around, but how many of us have encountered sites built entirely in Flash? Or have a requirement of Flash for simple things like navigation? While some things obviously need Flash (such as Homestar Runner because they are Flash cartoons) others use Flash for no real reason. Currently most platforms have Flash or will be getting it. But adding a high-end graphics card to a computer just to view the web? Thats just a bit ridiculous.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
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.
... it just isn't at that point or even guaranteed to happen yet.
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
My work here is dung.
I've written a few games using the 2D canvas element. Invariably these games use 99% of the CPU because Javascript doesn't have a real sleep() function. There's no decent way to manipulate sounds (like an FMOD for javascript). Tests on my machine show that changing the line/fill color is expensive. There's no way to switch to full screen or to capture every key stroke/mouse movement. All of which is beside the really big issue: there's no decent debugger.
3D games sound like a nice idea but they'll be prohibitively expensive (time-wise) to develop, suffer bizarre bottlenecks not seen in native code, and have to work through the very limited browser interface. While Assembly demo coders might enjoy the challenge of working in such a limited environment, the rest of the world should wait for some real improvements.
Quake live (and similar apps) require you to download a plugin.
Ideally, webGL will eventually be included in browsers so any webpage could use accelerated GL without requiring you to download a plugin first. (I'm not an expert, this is just what I've gathered so far, corrections are welcome).
Here's a nice summary.
It seems O3D is higher-level, thus allowing more to be handled by the browser, whereas WebGL forces Javascript to handle just about everything.
I'm not sure which one I like better. In theory, I like Javascript handling everything. In practice, I don't know enough about VMs to say whether Javascript could be made to perform well enough.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
The point is that nobody really cares all that much about what you do, as the web industry does not revolve around you.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
but oh god no! I can only imagine the horrors that will be visited upon the Internet once MySpace users get a hold of this.
I may agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to face the consequences of saying it.
This is about Try #4 for 3D on the Web. Web3D was an XML representation of VRML. Unfortunately, the effect of the Web3D consortium was to kill VRML in favor of a vaporware concept.
3D in the browser is done well in Macromedia Shockwave. Try this 3D driving game. The Shockwave player is supposedly available on 58% of PCs. Some versions of Shockwave even had the Havok physics engine, but Macromedia stopped paying Havok for the license and took that out.
The main problem with Shockwave is that it doesn't start as fast as Flash does. Flash has a nice scheme for interleaving the timeline and the asset data, so that playing starts very quickly. At least if the content is authored properly. Also, Shockwave authoring tools are expensive.
About Java 3D, the less said, the better.
The problem with offering OpenGL access to Javascript is that Javascript isn't a good language for fast matrix math. Also, authoring tools will have to be developed. You can't effectively author 3D content in a text editor.
How will we manage to use this? Programatically by Javascript, right? Javascript is so limited that I fail to see how it will be to make this actually usable [snip] Javascript also needs some cleanup and some more functionality.
Like what? It's a very rich language which is a pleasure to use. The historical short-coming has been it's libraries (primarily the DOM). But the language itself is really nice, as nearly anyone with enough experience will tell you.
And, besides, I can already imagine each browser doing it in it's own way and developers having to set up multiple ways to deal with the differences.
This is the case with all standards. If there are significant implementation errors, higher-level libraries will emerge that "fix" them for the users of this API. Ajax is different between browsers, is this a problem for anyone? No, there are multiple free libraries that are super-simple to use that make the right call in each browser. $.ajax({url: "foo.html"}); Just Works (tm).
There aint no pancake so thin it doesn't have two sides.
While Assembly demo coders might enjoy the challenge of working in such a limited environment, the rest of the world should wait for some real improvements.
Most of your complaints have been addressed in other modules of HTML5. See the media module for native sound support and web workers for threading support.
Regarding debuggers, there are a few excellent debuggers for JavaScript capable of profiling and doing all sorts of stuff. The most notable being WebKit's native Web Inspector and the FireBug extension.
Performance concerns with "fill color" and such are not an issue because they are offloaded to the graphics card.
Full screen mode is controlled by the user agent, not the web page for obvious reasons. Most browsers have support for a full screen mode in some fashion.
Now this is not to say that it's perfect. However, things are looking pretty good. :) This is definitely the future, the question is just how long will it take to get there.
You're right - I bet people were thinking making an online game with this, but now they've discovered that you alone will have this disabled, there's obviously no point doing it. It's a good thing you posted to let them know, and save them the trouble!