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There's a WebGL talk at WWDC 2014

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Re: There's a WebGL talk at WWDC 2014

#31

Post by rsynnott »

Touche wrote: post #30
rsynnott wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everyone I've ever talked to was 100% certain it was simply because they didn't want anyone by-passing the app store for games and other immersive content they would then have no control over. This never made sense to me as an explanation, if only because for a very long time iOS had a far more sophisticated browser than Android; Android only really reached feature parity with Chrome for Android, and for years iOS…

While true, to be fair they've hardly put much effort into the browser since iOS 3 or 4. Still far behind on many important web standards. Still do releases like once a year. Haven't improve homescreen webapps at all (every time you click the icon it starts the app from-scratch, even if it was already open).

> While true, to be fair they've hardly put much effort into the browser since iOS 3 or 4. Still far behind on many important web standards.

Well, it's much, much faster, and they've added plenty of stuff since IOS4 (web sockets, for instance, which it had a fair while before Chrome for Android).

Re: There's a WebGL talk at WWDC 2014

#32

Post by potatolicious »

tantalor wrote: post #26
cconroy wrote: post #18

I really hope WebGl+javascript kills CSS and html and all the other web stuff and we get back to desktop rich applications. And a URL can map to some state/object too. Google can then think about searching for things richer than just textual.

Not sure if you are trolling... HTML and WebGL are mostly orthogonal. For example, you do not want to render text or form controls in WebGL. We can improve HTML rendering with GPU-accelerated compositing, but that's mostly behind the scenes.

I don't think they're trolling - I have some similar feelings about this too. I think the main point is that outside of document-centric websites (say, Wikipedia), rich webapps are basically grossly abusing HTML to wrangle it into a semi-sane (but not really sane) way to render desktop-style UIs.

Think GMail, think Pandora - neither of which parses logically as a document, but are made from HTML: horribly hacky, horribly complex HTML at that.

It would seem to me that we're making HTML do something it was never meant to do, and that there are many applications on the web today that really don't need that stack at all, and really just need code and a renderer (like, say, a desktop OS).

Of course, this is a double edged sword. Simply tossing a renderer to devs is just going to invite a whole slew of confusing, non-standard UIs. Though, that said, if you look at GMail et al, we're already there.

Re: There's a WebGL talk at WWDC 2014

#33

Post by bgirard »

erickt wrote: post #16
higherpurpose wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if Firefox will remain the only browser out there without a process sandbox. It's still the most vulnerable browser because of that: http://www.extremetech.com/computing/178587-firefox-is-still...

It is coming soon. Firefox Nightly has it as an option, and according to this it's supposed to be an option in Firefox 30. I'm not sure when it will be turned on by default though: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis

Electrolysis is NOT sandboxing, full stop.

Re: There's a WebGL talk at WWDC 2014

#34

Post by Gorbzel »

shadowmint wrote: post #11
0x0 wrote: post #2

Wild speculation: iOS 8 will bring an out-of-process, heavily sandboxed webview, which was the missing piece for enabling webgl for everyone. The greatly increased attack surface (with almost direct gpu access via shaders etc) was too risky to host in in-process web views - explains why webgl was only enabled for iAds (since those would be vetted by a review team)

> The greatly increased attack surface (with almost direct gpu access via shaders etc) was too risky to host in in-process web views What really? Were they seriously even pretending to use that excuse? Everyone I've ever talked to was 100% certain it was simply because they didn't want anyone by-passing the app store for games and other immersive content they would then have no control over. I'm not denying that webg…

I love this useless outlook that Apple's ecosystem arguments (which may or may not be relevant banter, depending on your outlook. I for one am tired of the fighting.) automatically mean that all engineering decisions the company makes are automatically ANTI-FREEDOM!!111!!1

It's not like Apple's been a major engineering company in the center of some meaningful tech discussions (RFCs, open source projects sometimes, etc) for 30+ years. Not respecting other people's technical decisions really just hampers/hinders good collaborative work and conversation (especially about security) getting done.

Re: There's a WebGL talk at WWDC 2014

#36

Post by bgirard »

higherpurpose wrote: post #8
0x0 wrote: post #2

Wild speculation: iOS 8 will bring an out-of-process, heavily sandboxed webview, which was the missing piece for enabling webgl for everyone. The greatly increased attack surface (with almost direct gpu access via shaders etc) was too risky to host in in-process web views - explains why webgl was only enabled for iAds (since those would be vetted by a review team)

I wonder if Firefox will remain the only browser out there without a process sandbox. It's still the most vulnerable browser because of that: http://www.extremetech.com/computing/178587-firefox-is-still...

We were talking about this yesterday. I asked how many of the previous issues we classified a security problem would of been mitigated by a sandbox and the conclusion would be that it would not even cover the majority.

Most of the security issues we encounter are with bugs in the driver. A common bug for example with the Intel mac driver is when sending allocating a valid large texture the texture will sometimes instead be filled with old gpu memory[1]. Then you can glReadPixel the data and reconstruct parts of the desktop windows or tabs. A sandbox isn't going to stop you from exploiting this kind of buggy driver if it incorrectly starts returning other people's data when you asking for unrelated valid commands.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=631258

Re: There's a WebGL talk at WWDC 2014

#37

Post by andrewmunsell »

general_failure wrote: post #35
AshleysBrain wrote: post #3

If Safari gets WebGL, combined with the new FTL JIT it could end up being pretty darn awesome for gaming.

Jit is disabled in uiwebview

So is WebGL[1], but it is possible that Apple has chosen to open this up beyond the native Safari app by implementing some additional security measures (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7783137). Of course, we won't know until WWDC, but it certainly is a possibility.

[1]: WebGL is enabled for iAds.

Re: There's a WebGL talk at WWDC 2014

#38

Post by willvarfar »

bgirard wrote: post #36
higherpurpose wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if Firefox will remain the only browser out there without a process sandbox. It's still the most vulnerable browser because of that: http://www.extremetech.com/computing/178587-firefox-is-still...

We were talking about this yesterday. I asked how many of the previous issues we classified a security problem would of been mitigated by a sandbox and the conclusion would be that it would not even cover the majority. Most of the security issues we encounter are with bugs in the driver. A common bug for example with the Intel mac driver is when sending allocating a valid large texture the texture will sometimes inst…

I thought webgl didn't have glreadpixels?

Re: There's a WebGL talk at WWDC 2014

#39

Post by cowchase »

bgirard wrote: post #33
erickt wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is coming soon. Firefox Nightly has it as an option, and according to this it's supposed to be an option in Firefox 30. I'm not sure when it will be turned on by default though: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis

Electrolysis is NOT sandboxing, full stop.

To cite the wiki: "sandboxing the content processes is a separate project from Electrolysis". So Electrolysis lays the foundation for sandboxing.

Re: There's a WebGL talk at WWDC 2014

#40

Post by mikeash »

judah wrote: post #21

The title is misleading. It should read, "There's a WebGL talk at WWDC 2014." This blogger spotted a talk at WWDC 2014 on WebGL. He speculates this means there's a forthcoming release of Safari with WebGL enabled by default, thus predicting Apple is embracing WebGL. But we don't actually know that.

Seriously. WWDC starts in a week and a half. If Apple is really embracing WebGL, we'll probably find out on the first day. Is it so hard to wait?
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