Google's Reply to IE9's Fishtank Demo

IE9 is really a new direction from MSFT, or maybe is it just from the IETeam. While most Microsoft fans will cheer the IE9's H/W acceleration and concentrate on FPS numbers, I see the new support of standards from Microsoft as the amazing thing. Well done.

Among other things, they dropped VML and their event handling API, in favour of SVG and W3 DOM events. [Don;t be alarmed, IE7's rendering engine is included inside for broken^H^H^H^H^H older sites] They put-in Canvas support, even if I never thought they'd do that in a million years due to competition with Silverlight.

Anyway, to me, as a tech-guy and an instructor, IE9 is irrelevant now. Why? One word: WebGL.

Watch:

1) Google's answer to the fishtank demo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pM9LBcKxK4
2) http://www.iquilezles.org/apps/shadertoy/   Sorry, IE9 not supported WebGL Browsers only (FF4, Chrome, Safari, etc.)

Summery: Well done Microsoft, please don't stop here!

WebGL is not a standard. So, um, yay for the proprietary web? Or do different rules apply when it's not Microsoft?

"WebGL is a cross-platform, royalty-free web standard for a low-level 3D graphics API based on OpenGL ES 2.0, exposed through the HTML5 Canvas element as Document Object Model interfaces. Developers familiar with OpenGL ES 2.0 will recognize WebGL as a Shader-based API using GLSL, with constructs that are semantically similar to those of the underlying OpenGL ES 2.0 API. It stays very close to the OpenGL ES 2.0 specification, with some concessions made for what developers expect out of memory-managed languages such as JavaScript.

WebGL brings plugin-free 3D to the web, implemented right into the browser. Major browser vendors Apple (Safari), Google (Chrome), Mozilla (Firefox), and Opera (Opera) are members of the WebGL Working Group."

So it seems it is only a different rule that does apply when it is microsoft. And that rule is to be behind in browser development AGAIN despite all the effort of trying to catch up to the competition with IE9.

"It stays very close to the OpenGL ES 2.0 specification, with some concessions made for what developers expect out of memory-managed languages such as JavaScript."

So basically its a thin wrapper over OpenGL?  I don't see how this is appropiate as a web standard.  The web is supposed to be all about declarative markup that is essentially retained-mode graphics where the browser manages all the rendering end-to-end.  This allows the content, formatting, and layout to be agnostic of the user agent.  It may render differently for print, or desktop display, or on a mobile device.  Canvas, and by extension, WebGL, are basically immediate-mode graphics in the browser and I don't think they mesh well with existing web standards.

Anyway, WebGL just comes off as a lazy hack to me.  Why would you want to expose all of OpenGL with its massive complexity and huge surface area to the web developer?  Yeah you can do cool tech demos, but its basically just native app development that happens to run in the browser frame.  They're trying to shoehorn a native library into the browser that was never designed with this in mind.  You may as well just install a plugin or build some sandbox for running native code in browser, that's really the larger problem they're trying to solve here.

Standard is all about how many people use it. Since all three FF, Chrom, and Safari are using it. MS better supoort it, otherwsie, MS will fail. One vs Three, you tell me how will win? So, yeah, IE9 better to something about it, or it will fail. Fighting the browser war alone = you are alone.

17 minutes ago, magicalclick wrote

Standard is all about how many people use it. Since all three FF, Chrom, and Safari are using it. MS better supoort it, otherwsie, MS will fail. One vs Three, you tell me how will win? So, yeah, IE9 better to something about it, or it will fail. Fighting the browser war alone = you are alone.

So if I understand your logic correctly, then really IE is the standard and every other browser should implement whatever IE implements, whether it is an official standard or not (based on "how many people use it").

Actually the more I think about WebGL, the more I realize what a bad idea this is.  There are some really nasty security implications.  You're essentially exposing a huge, complex 3D software stack inside of the browser and letting a web page make almost arbitrary calls to it without user permission.  They even expose the GL shader language that get compiled by a display driver that is potentially running with kernel-mode privileges.  So now you can write code that gets compiled and executed entirely OUTSIDE the browser sandbox by code that is written with no security in mind.  There is a huge potential for exploits. 

Now theoretically shader code is just graphics and doesn't touch the file system or anything and should be possible to run without full-trust.  But GPU vendors can barely write drivers that don't crash, does anyone really trust their OpenGL implementations aren't exploitable?  Particularly the heavily-optimized and complex shader compilers.   Hey guys, let's add a shim to the browser to allow Javascript to invoke tons of code in some 20 meg nvidia_opengl_driver.dll without user permission, what could possibly go wrong?  I guarantee you there are tons of bugs, many of which may be potentially exploitable.

Cream​Filling512, we all know that betamax is far better then VHS, VML is far supirior to SVG, heck, even HTML is retarded, not to mention CSS. Oh, and my favourite one: 'i'd rather cut my right arm then program in JavaScript" [you can guess which developers think this. hint: they usually get certified by MSFT]

1) A bad standard is far supirior IMO to a great non-standard technology.

2) An OK standard today is better then a great standard a few years away

@fanbaby:

Then you'd make a lousy engineer, you have to look at all the data points.  Whether a technology is standardized or not is indeed a factor to consider when evalulating it, but its certainly not the end all, and certainly doesn't justify it being terribly broken.  And WebGL isn't a standard anyway so it's a moot point. Whether WebGL becomes a standard or not won't be known for years, but I certainly hope it dies off since I can't see it morphing into anything usable without starting from scratch.

CreamFilling512 it seems to me that you are somewhat invested in DirectX, are you?

With regards to your statement "Whether WebGL becomes a standard", WebGL is a standard accepted by all browser maker save MSFT, although it;s not a w3 standard, maybe that's what you meant.

@fanbaby:WebGL isn't a standard, it doesn't become a standard just because somebody arbitraily labels it as such. Otherwise we could just say DirectX is a standard. Things just don't work like that.

Personally I don't want to see a web 3D api that looks like either DirectX or OpenGL, neither is appropriate and neither really benefits the web. Something more akin to WPF3D (but not actually WPF3D) which brings a truly declarative 3D description, into which all HTML elements can be embedded, would be far more powerful and useful.

The biggest mistake anyone can make is to just try and expose every OS API to the browser directly, without really thinking through the implications.

AndyC, "The biggest mistake anyone can make is to just try and expose every OS API to the browser directly, without really thinking through the implications."

OpenGL, thus WebGL isn't an "OS API". What are you arguing for?

Also, Google, Apple, Mozilla and Opera(?) think WebGL is a standard are they wrong?

If I'm understanding this correctly, WebGL is a simple wrapper around OpenGL. If that's the case, then the computer will need to support OpenGL, which relies on the individual OS's support and even individual video card driver support.

They don't think it's a standard, they just all support it in their product.

I'm not a web developer, but I have played around with OpenGL and Direct3D. Why any web developer would want to muck about at such a low level is beyond me.

OpenGL isn't an OS specific API. It's supported on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux (inc. WebOS, Android), iOS, *BSD, Solaris, IRIX, HP-UX, Haiku, and basically any OS with more then 100 users.

I like it and hope Microsoft is -or will be- behind this thing too. Plugin-free 3D for the Web is a great way to put it. One could think of a good one-liner: "shape it now or live with it later".

1 day ago, BitFlipper wrote

*snip*

So if I understand your logic correctly, then really IE is the standard and every other browser should implement whatever IE implements, whether it is an official standard or not (based on "how many people use it").

That statement will soon obsolete if we keep thinking like that. All three competitors all together have enough market share.

Just look at SQL... MS benift by using SQL as a starter business while the big guys don't use SQL. And in the end, most devs choose SQL whenever they can.,