[dead]
Chrome ships WebGPU
171–180 of 405 posts
Re: Chrome ships WebGPU
#172Earlier 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…
> In practice, no-one who answers a web permissions dialog truly knows if they have made the correct answer.
Counterpoint: if webpage with latest news (for example) immediately asks me to allow notification, access to webcamera and location I definitely know what is correct answer to these dialogs.
Re: Chrome ships WebGPU
#173This 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 pl…
I'm actually keeping a close eye on mach after seeing your talk about gkurve. That has made GPU accelerated 2D graphics look much more approachable to me.
I plan to experiment with that after I get a better understanding of the WebGPU c API.
Re: Chrome ships WebGPU
#174This 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 pl…
Zig is the "language I'm learning next" ;)
Re: Chrome ships WebGPU
#175Earlier 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.
They are highly paid enough to not work on it and smart enough to thwart suggestions like this with “permission overload issue”.
But more frankly, fingerprinting is a whack a mole issue and if it were a real security problem, it would slow feature advancements.
And fingerprinting is too unreliable for any real world use.
Re: Chrome ships WebGPU
#176In case you confused this with webgl as I did: > WebGPU is a new API for the web, which exposes modern hardware capabilities and allows rendering and computation operations on a GPU, similar to Direct3D 12, Metal, and Vulkan. Unlike the WebGL family of APIs, WebGPU offers access to more advanced GPU features and provides first-class support for general computations on the GPU.
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?
Fingerprinting is a very difficult and unreliable way of identifying users. You would not bank on fingerprinting to protect your money. You cannot bank on it to protect user info. You can just wish that you are targeting the right person.
Re: Chrome ships WebGPU
#177In case you confused this with webgl as I did: > WebGPU is a new API for the web, which exposes modern hardware capabilities and allows rendering and computation operations on a GPU, similar to Direct3D 12, Metal, and Vulkan. Unlike the WebGL family of APIs, WebGPU offers access to more advanced GPU features and provides first-class support for general computations on the GPU.
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?
"..all the operations are specified to deterministically produce the same bit-exact results on all hardware..."
You have to block floating point calculations as well if that is your intent.
Re: Chrome ships WebGPU
#178Earlier 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.
Just put WebGL/WebGPU behind permission and the problem is solved.
Just put WebUSB behind permission and the problem is solved.
Just put WebHID behind permission and the problem is solved.
Just put WebMIDI behind permission and the problem is solved.
Just put Filesystem Access behind permission and the problem is solved.
Just put Sensors behind permission and the problem is solved.
Just put Location behind permission and the problem is solved.
Just put Camera behind permission and the problem is solved.
Just put ...
I don't understand why highly paid Google and Firefox developers cannot understand such a simple idea.
Re: Chrome ships WebGPU
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aras is right, but the elephant in the room is still shitty mobile GPUs. Most of those new and fancy techniques don't work on mobile GPUs, and probably won't for the foreseeable future (Vulkan should actually have been two APIs: one for desktop GPUs, and one for mobile GPUs - and those new extensions are doing exactly that - splitting Vulkan into two more or less separate APIs, one that sucks (for mobile GPUs) and on…
I think it unrealistic management of expectations that desktop and mobile must or should be equal. There is plenty of web applications use cases one would like to run on a desktop, but they are irrelevant for mobile, for many other reasons as well. E.g. think editing spreadsheets.
WebGPU says the baseline should be what is supported on both desktop+mobile, and that extensions (in the future) should enable the desktop-only use cases.
Others seemingly argue that mobile should be ignored entirely, that WebGPU shouldn't work there, or that it should only work on bleeding-edge mobile hardware.
Re: Chrome ships WebGPU
#180Earlier 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.
> why highly paid Google ... developers
"Completely co-incidentally", it's in Google's best interest to be able to fingerprint everyone.
So, changing it to actually be privacy friendly while they have the lion's share of the market doesn't seem like it's going to happen without some major external intervention. :/