This is great news1 I'll be able to use WebGL with the majority of my users who use IE in what, 5-6 years?
IE11 to support WebGL
41–50 of 136 posts
Re: IE11 to support WebGL
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Considering they way it went down [1], Microsoft felt (and may still feel) that the web is an enterprise market. In so, that it was selling developer tools to web shops because the code goes through Microsoft servers to Microsoft clients. IE, a vertical integration to simplify HR decisions. [2] That ideology carries through to the spec—enterprise products often contain janky features that mean little to developers, b…
Is it common practice to force particular IDE to developers? Especially for web developers. I imagine my productivity would decrease quite dramatically for some time.
Only the most insane of companies explicitly require the use of a specific editor, but it's easy for the choices of technology to implicitly limit developers to a single IDE. If your project's build system assumes that everyone is using Visual Studio (or Eclipse, or whatever), then using something else is going to either require a lot of switching between them or a lot of extra work on your part.
Re: IE11 to support WebGL
#43And IE11 will support Windows 7, right?
They need to support these newer browsers on older operating systems. If the OS is still being actively patched, new browsers should be made backwards compatible to work on it otherwise we'll have exact same problem with IE8 on XP and IE9 on Vista. And soon to be IE10 on Windows 7.
Re: IE11 to support WebGL
#44Re: IE11 to support WebGL
#45Awesome news! And the Xbox One is already available in 3D display with WebGL! https://sketchfab.com/show/qsRPEw7hTKC4E02XMop9DUpu2wb
Re: IE11 to support WebGL
#46Is it just me, or are that others that think "Didn't it support that yet?!" at every IE release? I don't use Windows so I never use IE anymore, but I'd think IE9 or 10 would support WebGL by now...
Additionally, Microsoft was on record saying they believed plugins like Silverlight provided sufficient 3d capabilities, and that WebGL was huge surface area for security vulnerabilities. They've apparently reversed that stance.
Since Windows 8, MS has reversed it's stance on Silverlight and browser plugins in general.
I don't disagree with Microsoft's point in this article. http://blogs.technet.com/b/srd/archive/2011/06/16/webgl-cons...
I assume that they've decided to work towards solving the security issues instead of simply staying away from the issue.
Long term I hope this means more stable and reliable video drivers :)
Re: IE11 to support WebGL
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
WebGL was bleeding-edge when IE 9 was released, and there were still very valid concerns about its security for a while after that. Opera implemented it, but disabled it due to these concerns. After their nightmarish history with security, Microsoft are very focused on hardening Windows — so I wouldn't exactly call it regressive to leave WebGL out of IE 10, which was probably feature-frozen in early 2012.
Opera didn't disable it due to security concerns per se — rather more just the general bugginess of Opera's hardware acceleration. I wouldn't consider crash bugs in general security issues. Equally, there is software rendered mode, but it's pointlessly slow to enable. Note the prior concerns are still just as true today as they were a few years ago — graphics drivers are still relatively easy to find crash bugs in, l…
> I wouldn't consider crash bugs in general security issues
You should, until proven otherwise. If it crashes because it's reading an invalid memory location (for instance), it's a matter of time before someone figures out how to place executable code there.
I have no problem with MS's original position. WebGL forces your hardware drivers to run random code downloaded from the internet. I'm frankly surprised that the other browser vendors ran ahead with it so quickly and that we haven't heard about any exploits caused by it.
Re: IE11 to support WebGL
#48Is it just me, or are that others that think "Didn't it support that yet?!" at every IE release? I don't use Windows so I never use IE anymore, but I'd think IE9 or 10 would support WebGL by now...
WebGL was bleeding-edge when IE 9 was released, and there were still very valid concerns about its security for a while after that. Opera implemented it, but disabled it due to these concerns. After their nightmarish history with security, Microsoft are very focused on hardening Windows — so I wouldn't exactly call it regressive to leave WebGL out of IE 10, which was probably feature-frozen in early 2012.
It is fair to say that there were some security concerns, but those have been addressed, and actually Microsoft - which controls the OS and the browser, and is heavily involved in driver quality - is in an excellent position to create a safe implementation of WebGL.
It's fine that it took them time and they wanted to do it properly. It is however annoying that they did not give any forward notice of their intention to implement WebGL and have not been active in the standards bodies at all. For example, Microsoft input on the safety aspects could have been very useful.
Re: IE11 to support WebGL
#49better late than never i guess.
Re: IE11 to support WebGL
#50What engineering did they do to reduce the security risk? As much as I like WebGL as a dev, Microsoft's arguments against feeding arbitrary machine code to buggy graphics cards that have kernel-level memory access privileges... seemed a bit convincing.