IE11 To Support WebGL

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."

Comments

April Fool's...

[sstamps]

..was yesterday.

Just like Microsoft.. a day late and an API short. :P

What a silly statement

[Sycraft-fu]

"it seems reasonable to guess that the implementation maps OpenGL to DirectX, thus avoiding Microsoft having to endorse OpenGL use."

No, more likely MS doesn't want to have to rely on vendors providing a working OpenGL driver, since that can be problematic (looking at you here ATi). If you have an accelerated Windows driver, a WDDM driver, it has DirectX support. That is how it works, just part of the spec. OpenGL, however, is an addon. Vendors can provide an OpenGL driver, or any other API they like, if they wish but it isn't an inherent part of the driver. They can choose not to provide them, or can provide broken ones.

So, would make sense for WebGl support to have something that does translation, so it works as long as you have a WDDM driver installed.

Re:What a silly statement

[gigaherz]

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. "

Re:What a silly statement

[ais523]

Basically the problem is that OpenGL has a lot of old cruft in that people have been trying to get rid of for a while, that made sense at the time but nowadays only exists for backwards compatibility. OpenGL ES is gaining in prominence because it looks like it might actually be a chance to make a clean break with OpenGL's past.

Re:What a silly statement

[exomondo]

Now correct me if I'm wrong but isn't OpenGL ES a much wimpier subset of OpenGL cooked up for cellphones and consoles NOT for desktops? That was the way I had always heard it explained which if so makes all the hubub just one more "ZOMFG we can be like the iPhone!" as far as I'm concerned.

Kind of, ES doesn't have a lot of the - now deprecated or removed - cruft in OpenGL like the Begin/End calls in favor of the more modern techniques. It isn't quite as cutting edge as the full OpenGL desktop version that you get in the latest desktop hardware, there are some features like geometry shaders that it omits - i don't think there is support for bindless graphics either - but it has pulled in features like multiple render targets and a lot of new texture format options. Generally ES gets the most used/popular features of OpenGL in the following major release.

Re:What a silly statement

[gigaherz]

OpenGL is not an opensource project. It's an open standard managed by a group that's composed of experts from hardware and software corporations, and sponsored by those (and maybe other) companies. The group's name is Khronos. and yes, THEY decide what OpenGL looks like, and who can use the OpenGL logo. Of course you could create a LibreGL, that bases itself on OpenGL, but flows in a different direction, but then you will NOT be sponsored by all those large corporations, who will most probably ignore your effort, good or bad. If you did succeed, though, it would be a truly amazing achievement.

On a side note, OpenGL 3.0 was supposed to be exactly that. They were supposed to remove all then nonsense from the API, and give us something clean and effective. But by the time it was out of the box, it turned out to be just yet another set of extensions added into the core, and some little side notes in old features saying they were now considered deprecated. They did add non-backwards-compatible profiles in version 3.1, which, if activated, disable all of the old features that were marked as deprecated in 3.0, but they had already disappointed everyone by then.

Re:Another ASP debacle

[Millennium]

You mean like the alleged hole that supposedly left Microsoft with no choice but to remove NPAPI plugin support from IE back in the 1990s?

Frankly, this is huge. Direct3D is probably Microsoft's second most effective tool for locking-in users (behind MSOffice) and the single most effective tool for locking-in developers. To officially support its open competitor -and in a way that would allow apps (read: games) to actually be played on other platforms, no less- is uncharacteristic of them, to put it mildly. Are they so afraid of WebGL's potential that they see simply supporting it as less risky than embrace-extend-extinguish?

Re:IE11 is getting good!

[exomondo]

As a 3d graphics dev (primarily OpenGL these days) I reckon it's great that IE is supporting WebGL, it might not be a standard of any sort yet but obviously some sort of access to 3d graphics hardware from the browser is inevitable and the ubiquity of OpenGL makes it - or at least an API based closely on it - the obvious choice, even if on some platforms it's a wrapper for whatever native 3d API that platform uses. I'm still concerned about the security and stability implications of exposing the most volatile piece of computing hardware through the browser though.

Win2k, WinXP, Vista, Win7 all got major IE upgrade

[tepples]

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.

Re:Another ASP debacle

[NatasRevol]

The other option is that they're in step one of the embrace-extend-extinguish dance.

Re:I wonder

[robmv]

Windows Blue = Windows 8 SP1, The name is a marketing trick

Re: The biggest problem

[cyber-vandal]

Care to elaborate? I log on as field users to determine what is causing their issues with Dynamics CRM, an application I don't have the source to and which gives very cryptic error messages. If you have a better solution I'll be over the moon to use that instead.

Re:I wonder

[exomondo]

Windows Blue seems to just be a codename.

Re:IE11 is getting good!

[cbhacking]

IE10 is out for Win7. Have you seen any documented evidence that IE11 won't be available for Win7? I mean, I have no evidence either way, but since they're now releasing browser versions on a more accelerated schedule it seems likely they'll support them on the current generation most-popular Windows variant.