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There's a WebGL talk at WWDC 2014

blog.playcanvas.com

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Re: There's a WebGL talk at WWDC 2014

#11

Post by shadowmint »

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 webgl is an attack surface; it totally is; but surely it's a bit rich to say that the webgl implementation in webkit has been switched off for the last 3 years because of security concerns.

If that was the only reason to not having feature parity with other OS's, they'd have some something about it.. oh, you know. 2-3 years ago.

Re: There's a WebGL talk at WWDC 2014

#14

Post by Flow »

twoodfin wrote: post #5
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)

Would be nice to get something similar for in-app JavaScript JIT'ing.

Or a standard way to use sandboxes from within your apps. So you can do on-the-fly code generation.

Re: There's a WebGL talk at WWDC 2014

#16

Post by erickt »

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...

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

Re: There's a WebGL talk at WWDC 2014

#17

Post by coldtea »

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…

>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.

Well, "everyone you ever talked to" was wrong. Apple could not care less about web apps by-passing the app store in this regard.

For one, they initially offered web apps in place of a native API, and developers (and users) hated it.

Second, they had for the longest time (still do IIRC), the fastest and more complete web browser experience on mobile. Including extra JS hooks for things like the accelerometer and such. Strange coming from a company concerned about the web apps by-passing the app store.

Third, most iOS developers don't pericularly want web apps. The App Store has half a billion of credit cards on the ready, and gives billions of dollars to developers each year. It will be extremely difficult to try to monetize some web based game for iOS users. Plus it offers far better performance (and possibilities for integration) than some Javascript/WebGL game.

Fourth, WebGL is not that great a deal on the desktop web yet (even most casual games prefer the canvas API or Flash still), so why would it be on the mobile web?

>If that was the only reason to not having feature parity with other OS's, they'd have some something about it.. oh, you know. 2-3 years ago.

Well, those other OSes, namely Android, just enabled WebGL in their Chrome browser 9 months ago. And, oh you know, that in the beta version of the broswer. In fact, "Can I Use It", still shows only partial support for WebGL, and for the first time available just in the latest Android Chrome version: http://caniuse.com/webgl

Re: There's a WebGL talk at WWDC 2014

#18

Post by cconroy »

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.

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