5 ms·

"Google's reasoning for the move is largely performance-based, apparently" Now if only they can start optimizing Chrome urgently, that'd be just great!

monksy 11y ago
Now 16gb isn't enough to run Chrome? Why am I feeling that Crysis may be more reasonable than Chrome?
_pmf_ 11y ago
> "Google's reasoning for the move is largely performance-based, apparently" Yeah, because WebGL never crashes the browser (not even the kind of small demos that seems to be all it's used for).
- onion2k 11y ago
  I've been developing WebGL content for the past 18 months and, so far, it hasn't crashed from any WebGL issues. And that's with my code which is pretty awful most of the time.
  - dogma1138 11y ago
    I've had WebGL crashes quite often on YouTube. Allot of the WebGL demos are also either forcing a WebGL crash from time to time or just hang browsers due to performance. You can say allot about Flash but atm it's performance and stability are better than WebGL in it's current state. The problem with WebGL is that it pretty much inherited the mess of OpenGL every driver version on every GPU can implement different feature set of it (similar to the extension mess of OpenGL in Nvidia and ATI minidrivers at the time) which results in Browsers having to maintain blacklist/whitelists[1] for a very large array of hardware and software combinations (Chrome currently isn't maintaining a driver version based list other than a cut off date for certain drivers which also causes problems if you are running old hardware and the best drivers for it are considered out of date by Google). WebGL it self is also not implemented in the same manner across different browsers Chrome and FF for example have quite a different blacklist/whitelist for WebGL, I don't know if this because of different in browser implementation or because of they are simply encountering different issues and adjusting accordingly. The worse thing I've encountered so far is WebGL on switchable graphics (e.g. Nvidia Optimus) enabled laptops, some features might switch the GPU arbitrarily even mid execution which causes the whole thing to implode.. [1]https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/gpu/+/master/config/software_rendering_list_json.cc https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/gpu/+/master/... Whats worse is that WebGL can actually crash your graphics driver and if it's bad enough than Windows can't recover the kernel mode driver it's a complete kernel panic. This doesn't happen often but if you want to do it you can do it sadly too easily, Chrome/FF chase known DOS cases with WebCL quite well but they really don't catch all of them and if that feature isn't blacklisted for your setup well you can crash a machine with a single pixel draw ;) And the introduction of WebCL would probably lead to some of the nastiest RCE vulnerabilities you can imagine soon enough you are allowing people to execute general purpose code directly on the metal and interact with Kernel mode components. There are already GPU rootkits out there soon enough they'll find an infection vector trough WebGL or WebCL and it will be a very unpleasant period.
    - jaen 11y ago
      Chrome & FF do not use OpenGL drivers on Windows, they translate to DirectX using Angle: https://code.google.com/p/angleproject/ https://code.google.com/p/angleproject/
      - dogma1138 11y ago
        I didn't say they use OpenGL, the WebGL implementation on Windows is trickey since there is no OpenGL mini driver so native support is implemented a bit differently it's only matters who does the translation (GPU driver, vs Browser). Also are you sure they still use ANGLE by default? Both Chrome and FF had the ability to enable native support years ago using –use-gl=desktop for Chrome or webgl.prefer-native-gl for FF, 2-3 years ago that was the only way of getting any reasonable performance out of them.. But even with ANGLE, WebGL feature implementation is still not consistent across hardware and drivers (Graphic drivers treat DX like one would treat a 5 year old, they'll hear it and do what they want ;)) from even a single vendor yet alone across the 3 desktop and 3-4 mobile GPU vendors.
  - michaelt 11y ago
    My home computer has been fine, but my work computer has a bunch of browser-crashing problems. I've raised bug reports, but unfortunately that means coordinating a bug report between between the website, the browser, the graphics drivers, and the graphics card manufacturer. Unfortunately the abstraction layers aren't yet good enough that something stable on nvidia will be stable on ati :)
  - spyder 11y ago
    That's just means that it works with your video card(s), but it can still crash with other/older cards. For example on the ShaderToy website ( https://www.shadertoy.com/browse https://www.shadertoy.com/browse ) I can always easily find examples that crashes WebGL in Chrome (and it's just slower or hangs in Firefox). Right on that first page there are shaders that makes WebGL crash on two different computers (one with an older NVIDIA card and one with just integrated so not the fastest ones). But it crashes only the WebGL part not the whole browser, so that's not so bad. Also it could be because Chrome sees WebGL code is running slow (due to slower cards and the complex shaders) and decides it's better to kill it, just like when there is an infinite loop in Flash or JavaScript the browsers shows a dialog to stop the code.

monksy 11y ago

Now 16gb isn't enough to run Chrome? Why am I feeling that Crysis may be more reasonable than Chrome?

_pmf_ 11y ago

> "Google's reasoning for the move is largely performance-based, apparently" Yeah, because WebGL never crashes the browser (not even the kind of small demos that seems to be all it's used for).

onion2k 11y ago
I've been developing WebGL content for the past 18 months and, so far, it hasn't crashed from any WebGL issues. And that's with my code which is pretty awful most of the time.
- dogma1138 11y ago
  I've had WebGL crashes quite often on YouTube. Allot of the WebGL demos are also either forcing a WebGL crash from time to time or just hang browsers due to performance. You can say allot about Flash but atm it's performance and stability are better than WebGL in it's current state. The problem with WebGL is that it pretty much inherited the mess of OpenGL every driver version on every GPU can implement different feature set of it (similar to the extension mess of OpenGL in Nvidia and ATI minidrivers at the time) which results in Browsers having to maintain blacklist/whitelists[1] for a very large array of hardware and software combinations (Chrome currently isn't maintaining a driver version based list other than a cut off date for certain drivers which also causes problems if you are running old hardware and the best drivers for it are considered out of date by Google). WebGL it self is also not implemented in the same manner across different browsers Chrome and FF for example have quite a different blacklist/whitelist for WebGL, I don't know if this because of different in browser implementation or because of they are simply encountering different issues and adjusting accordingly. The worse thing I've encountered so far is WebGL on switchable graphics (e.g. Nvidia Optimus) enabled laptops, some features might switch the GPU arbitrarily even mid execution which causes the whole thing to implode.. [1]https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/gpu/+/master/config/software_rendering_list_json.cc https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/gpu/+/master/... Whats worse is that WebGL can actually crash your graphics driver and if it's bad enough than Windows can't recover the kernel mode driver it's a complete kernel panic. This doesn't happen often but if you want to do it you can do it sadly too easily, Chrome/FF chase known DOS cases with WebCL quite well but they really don't catch all of them and if that feature isn't blacklisted for your setup well you can crash a machine with a single pixel draw ;) And the introduction of WebCL would probably lead to some of the nastiest RCE vulnerabilities you can imagine soon enough you are allowing people to execute general purpose code directly on the metal and interact with Kernel mode components. There are already GPU rootkits out there soon enough they'll find an infection vector trough WebGL or WebCL and it will be a very unpleasant period.
  - jaen 11y ago
    Chrome & FF do not use OpenGL drivers on Windows, they translate to DirectX using Angle: https://code.google.com/p/angleproject/ https://code.google.com/p/angleproject/
    - dogma1138 11y ago
      I didn't say they use OpenGL, the WebGL implementation on Windows is trickey since there is no OpenGL mini driver so native support is implemented a bit differently it's only matters who does the translation (GPU driver, vs Browser). Also are you sure they still use ANGLE by default? Both Chrome and FF had the ability to enable native support years ago using –use-gl=desktop for Chrome or webgl.prefer-native-gl for FF, 2-3 years ago that was the only way of getting any reasonable performance out of them.. But even with ANGLE, WebGL feature implementation is still not consistent across hardware and drivers (Graphic drivers treat DX like one would treat a 5 year old, they'll hear it and do what they want ;)) from even a single vendor yet alone across the 3 desktop and 3-4 mobile GPU vendors.
- michaelt 11y ago
  My home computer has been fine, but my work computer has a bunch of browser-crashing problems. I've raised bug reports, but unfortunately that means coordinating a bug report between between the website, the browser, the graphics drivers, and the graphics card manufacturer. Unfortunately the abstraction layers aren't yet good enough that something stable on nvidia will be stable on ati :)
- spyder 11y ago
  That's just means that it works with your video card(s), but it can still crash with other/older cards. For example on the ShaderToy website ( https://www.shadertoy.com/browse https://www.shadertoy.com/browse ) I can always easily find examples that crashes WebGL in Chrome (and it's just slower or hangs in Firefox). Right on that first page there are shaders that makes WebGL crash on two different computers (one with an older NVIDIA card and one with just integrated so not the fastest ones). But it crashes only the WebGL part not the whole browser, so that's not so bad. Also it could be because Chrome sees WebGL code is running slow (due to slower cards and the complex shaders) and decides it's better to kill it, just like when there is an infinite loop in Flash or JavaScript the browsers shows a dialog to stop the code.