Firefox 4 beta 8 webgl demo

Installing the newest FF beta made me aware of  a great webgl demo i thought i'd share with you guys. The video is in WebM, H264 or Ogg format so i hope you can see it. The actual demo is here. WARNING: you need a webgl-enabled browser with a good setup (Mine didn't work: I have a vista  laptop with Intel GPU).

My point is this: do Microsoft fans here feel threatened by WebGL, especially since it's OpenGL-based, and, you know, the great rivelry OpenGL vs. DirectX. Is there a feeling that OpenGL is rising from the dead after being killed by DX?

Marry Christmas to those celebrating it!

-Meni

WebGL will most likely be a standard though and I think it's worth having if you're going to have Canvas.

As for Microsoft feeling threatened, I doubt it. People make a big thing about OpenGL versus DirectX but seem to forget Windows has state of the art OpenGL support and has done ever since there were PC graphics cards good enough to support it. Microsoft created DirectX because OpenGL wasn't suitable for PCs at the time and carried on developing it because OpenGL, being a committee standard, doesn't keep up with the card manufacturers speed of innovation. Does Microsoft care if games developers use OpenGL or DirectX? I doubt it. They care most of all the people make software that runs on Windows. So why do developers continue to use DirectX? Because the tools, samples, and just general level of support is much better.

15 minutes ago, CKurt wrote

..... Stopping to bash Internet Explorer about standards because they know about IE9 which is comming. It's not about Microsoft feeling threatened it's about Firefox and Chrome feeling threathened.....

 

I use FF and certainly don't feel threatened by IE9. On the contrary, as an open standards fanboy i rejoice. I think the Chrome and Firefox teams feel pretty much like me.

The thing that DOES scare me is the IE6 scenario all over again. Making sites that work only on some browsers.

24 minutes ago, CKurt wrote

*snip*

I know I'm harch but common, build HTML5 as a solid platform first and then build new stuff as a standard from the ground up <b>together</b> [emp mine, fanbaby] instead of trying to promote your own stuff. That just does not come over well with me.

 

Couldn't agree more. We are in a very special point in time, where even the Evil Empire[TM] is an underdog, (where is BillG when you need him?), and unfortunately only underdogs route for standards. I call upon IE9 team manager: make HTML5 a reality soon. and please don't stop there. So much more can be done NOW! Better audio, video, camera support, better security  a-la Dugles Crockford, other scripting languages, classes in JS, agreed PATENT-FREE video codec....

I am sure Google, Mozilla, and Opera are willing to cooperate. Make it fast for God's sake.

Oh look, they put a thin wrapper around OpenGL in their browser, while ignoring the fact that it isn't a web standard. That's...uhm...innovative...?

Sorry, are we supposed to be impressed?

@fanbaby:

The Evil Empire™ was an underdog in Netscape vs IE also. Netscape first had more market share and popularity, and even though IE was pre-installed on Windows, people would use IE to go download Netscape so they could use it. Eventually IE only came out sucessful when Microsoft came out with new versions that were better than Netscape. 

IE was the first browser, btw, to adopt CSS, Netscape was behind. AJAX, which is now a standard, was developed by Microsoft. And many of Microsofts properietary innovations, like @font-face, are now being rolled into CSS3.

When Firefox 1 came out, it had no better adherence to standards than IE did. It started having good compliance with version 3, around the same time other browsers (including IE7) did.

People need to stop drinking browser war koolaid.

3D SHALL BE THE SAVIOR OF THE INTERNET

RE: WebGL and Standards

WebGL is a standard defined by the Khronos Group, a very large industry wide consortium (that Microsoft strangely isn't a member of) that defines varies graphics standards including OpenGL. There is also an effort to turn WebGL into a W3C standard as well. It's worth noting HTML5 was developed in a similar manner.

BitFlipper, yes you should be impressed as all browser vendors save one implemented it.

Tell please, what is your opinion about JavaScript, CSS, and HTML? You know, HTML is a thin wrapper around Unix man (troff) syntax.

@CKurt, I'm well aware of IE9 and it's development. The IE9 team is the most open and promising team at Microsoft. A new Microsoft maybe. I am guessing that many teams and VPs inside Microsoft were opposed to the direction of the IE team. Their reasoning might be: "Where is Bill Gates? If he was in charge, boy. Few arm twisting and VML would be the prevailing vector markup, Silverlight would kill Flash/HTML5,  WMV would be the video standard etc."

BTW, Don't buy Microsoft's marketing that IE9's speed is THE thing. No it's not. It's nice to have dont get me wrong, but being standard complaint is THE most important thing about IE9.  Microsoft is saying: OK you want standards (doh, of course we do)?  here it is. Oh and by the way we dropped VML, ActiveX, and our old event-handling way. Suddenly, MSFT says SVG is great, being plugin-free is important and gosh, you can use the web to build web-apps. And all IE6 fanboys can say is: "hehehe IE9 smokes Firefox". sheesh....

The delusion over WebGL is this open source fanboy idea that somehow using an OpenGL wrapper will somehow be a "win" over Microsoft, regardless of whether or not it's an appropriate solution. Simple fact is that WebGL could easily be implemented on top of DirectX and would be as fast (and indeed probably faster, as Windows DirectX generally outperforms OpenGL on Linux/MacOS X).

The real issue is whether WebGL is the best way to add 3D support to the web (I think not, you may disagree) and whether pushing it as if it were ready for widespread adoption is actually a good idea. The recent farcical behaviour over Web Sockets, which the fanboys would've told you was basically done a few weeks ago, is evidence of why throwing together quick solutions isn't a great idea.

I'd much rather see the Firefox, Chrome and Opera teams working on resolving their poor compliance with HTML5 to bring it in line with where IE9 will be at launch and in producing more test cases to iron out the remaining discrepancies. That would do far more for the web than pushing yet more new technologies for the sake of marketing.

*dupe*

Hmmm.... probably only me, but, I would rather make 3D games on Flash and SL. Besides, I am not sure if my Intel Mobo GPU is capable of OpenGL or not. My notebook probably couldn't run WebGL anyway.

"I'd much rather see the Firefox, Chrome and Opera teams working on resolving their poor compliance with HTML5." AndyC

Ah, yes, it has been shown that Firefox and Chrome cannot show rounded styled border correctly. It is terrible. As a result, I'll stop using Firefox after tomorrow

Please stop bashing other browsers, It's so 2000's

I think IE6/7/8 was bashed so much was because of poor respect for standards (granted, standards formed after IE6 was shipped) and for Microsoft arrogant ways with other players.

Regarding the "wrapper" argument, see my comment above to BitFlipper. Standards don't have to be perfect. God knows - and Dugles Crockford disagrees - that JS isn't perfect. Yes, you may have other better suggestions, but you are playing fanboy games and holding up the web.

The SVG vs VML fanboy war held up vector graphics for about 10 years on the web . learn something from that.

3 hours ago, magicalclick wrote

Hmmm.... probably only me, but, I would rather make 3D games on Flash and SL. Besides, I am not sure if my Intel Mobo GPU is capable of OpenGL or not. My notebook probably couldn't run WebGL anyway.

There's a project to put OpenGL on top of DirectX for graphic cards with poor OpenGL drivers: Google's angle project.

Besides, your development preferences have nothing to do with an open web. Use WPF and XNA, it's easier