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IE11 To Support WebGL

Posted by Soulskill on from the better-late-than-never dept.

mikejuk writes "The biggest problem with IE10 as far as modern web apps go is its lack of WebGL support. Now we have strong evidence that IE11 will support WebGL. A leaked build of Windows 'Blue,' aka Windows 8.1, also contained an early version of IE11. Web developer François Remy decided to see what it was hiding and found that there were WebGL APIs, but they were non-functional. Rafael Rivera, who writes the Within Windows blog, dug a little deeper and discovered the registry keys that have to be changed to enable WebGL support. Apparently the API works so well that you can take existing WebGL programs (with OpenGL shaders) and just run them. As the implementation also supports DirectX HLSL shaders, it seems reasonable to guess that the implementation maps OpenGL to DirectX, thus avoiding Microsoft having to endorse OpenGL use."

2 of 111 comments (clear)

  1. Re:What a silly statement by gigaherz · · Score: 5, Informative

    Even Firefox uses Google's ANGLE to translate WebGL to Direct3D.

    From the ANGLE site: "The goal of ANGLE is to allow Windows users to seamlessly run WebGL and other OpenGL ES 2.0 content by translating OpenGL ES 2.0 API calls to DirectX 9 API calls. "

  2. Win2k, WinXP, Vista, Win7 all got major IE upgrade by tepples · · Score: 3, Informative

    So far, for every version of Windows since 2000, Microsoft has provided at least one major upgrade to Internet Explorer. Windows 2000 shipped with IE 5 and got 6, Windows XP shipped with 6 and got 8, Windows Vista shipped with 7 and got 9, and Windows 7 shipped with 8 and got 10. So I'd be inclined to assume that Windows 8, which shipped with IE 10, will get IE 11.