Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Chrome ships WebGPU

developer.chrome.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 405 posts

Re: Chrome ships WebGPU

#151

Post by slimsag »

This is very welcome and a long time coming!

If you're eager to learn WebGPU, consider checking out Mach[0] which lets you develop with it natively using Zig today very easily. We aim to be a competitor-in-spirit to Unity/Unreal/Godot, but extremely modular. As part of that we have Mach core which just provides Window+Input+WebGPU and some ~19 standalone WebGPU examples[1].

Currently we only support native desktop platforms; but we're working towards browser support. WebGPU is very nice because it lets us target desktop+wasm+mobile for truly-cross-platform games & native applications.

[0] https://github.com/hexops/mach

[1] https://github.com/hexops/mach-examples/tree/main/core

Re: Chrome ships WebGPU

#152

Post by codedokode »

paulgb wrote: post #85
fulafel wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possible to have the runtime execute the computations in fixed time across platforms.

This would essentially mean that every computation would have to run as slow as the slowest supported hardware. It would completely undermine the entire point of supporting hardware acceleration. I’m sympathetic to the privacy concerns but this isn’t a solution worth considering.

The solution is to put unncesessary features like WebGL, programmatic Audio API, reading bits from canvas and WebRTC behind a permission.

Re: Chrome ships WebGPU

#153

Post by merlish »

codedokode wrote: post #136
Timja wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no way to escape fingerprinting. Just one example: A script which runs many different types of computations. Each computation will take a certain amount of time depending on your hardware and software. So you will get a fingerprint like this: computation 1: ** computation 2: **** computation 3: ********** computation 4: ** computation 5: ************** computation 6: ************ computation 7: ********* etc…

Just put WebGL/WebGPU behind permission and the problem is solved. I don't understand why highly paid Google and Firefox developers cannot understand such a simple idea.

For a user to correctly answer a permissions dialog, they need to learn programming and read all the source code of the application. To say nothing of the negative effects of permission dialog fatigue.

In practice, no-one who answers a web permissions dialog truly knows if they have made the correct answer.

Asking the user a question they realistically can't answer correctly is not a solution. It's giving up on the problem.

Re: Chrome ships WebGPU

#154

Post by ericflo »

codedokode wrote: post #136
Timja wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no way to escape fingerprinting. Just one example: A script which runs many different types of computations. Each computation will take a certain amount of time depending on your hardware and software. So you will get a fingerprint like this: computation 1: ** computation 2: **** computation 3: ********** computation 4: ** computation 5: ************** computation 6: ************ computation 7: ********* etc…

Just put WebGL/WebGPU behind permission and the problem is solved. I don't understand why highly paid Google and Firefox developers cannot understand such a simple idea.

Look to the cookie fatigue fiasco for how that might turn out. This simple idea is not always the right one.

Re: Chrome ships WebGPU

#155

Post by 7to2 »

codedokode wrote: post #136
Timja wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no way to escape fingerprinting. Just one example: A script which runs many different types of computations. Each computation will take a certain amount of time depending on your hardware and software. So you will get a fingerprint like this: computation 1: ** computation 2: **** computation 3: ********** computation 4: ** computation 5: ************** computation 6: ************ computation 7: ********* etc…

Just put WebGL/WebGPU behind permission and the problem is solved. I don't understand why highly paid Google and Firefox developers cannot understand such a simple idea.

It's not that they don't understand it, it's that they don't want the average user to have a convenient way to control this setting. Prompting the user for permission would give the user a very convenient way to keep it disabled for most websites. It's as simple as that.

Think about it this way: Which is more tedious: going into the settings and enabling and disabling webGPU every time you need it or a popup? Which way would see you keeping it enabled?

Its tyranny of the default with an extra twist :)

Re: Chrome ships WebGPU

#156

Post by codedokode »

bhouston wrote: post #61
mike_hock wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And to prevent device fingerprinting, all the operations are specified to deterministically produce the same bit-exact results on all hardware, and the feature set is fixed without any support for extensions, right? Or is this yet another information leak anti-feature that we need to disable?

I track population frequency of WebGPU extensions/limits here: https://web3dsurvey.com . The situation currently is much better when WebGL1/WebGL2 but there is still a lot of surface area.

Interesting. The data shows that WEBGL_debug_rendered_info [1] which allows sites to know the name of your graphic card, is supported almost in 100% of browsers. Seems that better fingerprinting support is really a priority among all browser vendors.

[1] https://web3dsurvey.com/webgl/extensions/WEBGL_debug_rendere...

Re: Chrome ships WebGPU

#157

Post by 7to2 »

ericflo wrote: post #154
codedokode wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just put WebGL/WebGPU behind permission and the problem is solved. I don't understand why highly paid Google and Firefox developers cannot understand such a simple idea.

Look to the cookie fatigue fiasco for how that might turn out. This simple idea is not always the right one.

> [ ] Always choose this option.

Re: Chrome ships WebGPU

#158

Post by codedokode »

merlish wrote: post #153
codedokode wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just put WebGL/WebGPU behind permission and the problem is solved. I don't understand why highly paid Google and Firefox developers cannot understand such a simple idea.

For a user to correctly answer a permissions dialog, they need to learn programming and read all the source code of the application. To say nothing of the negative effects of permission dialog fatigue. In practice, no-one who answers a web permissions dialog truly knows if they have made the correct answer. Asking the user a question they realistically can't answer correctly is not a solution. It's giving up on the p…

They don't need to learn programming. Just write that this technology can be used for displaying 3D graphics and fingerprinting and let user decide whether they take the risk.

Re: Chrome ships WebGPU

#160

Post by misterdata »

FL33TW00D wrote: post #135

This is very exciting! (I had suspected it would slip to 114) WebGPU implementations are still pretty immature, but certainly enough to get started with. I've been implementing a Rust + WebGPU ML runtime for the past few months and have enjoyed writing WGSL. I recently got a 250M parameter LLM running in the browser without much optimisation and it performs pretty well! ( https://twitter.com/fleetwood___/status/16384…

Looking forward to your WebGPU ML runtime! Also, why not contribute back to WONNX? (https://github.com/webonnx/wonnx)
Post reply on HN