I think your argument shows why the web is such a poor platform in many areas. Second, there's no reason WebGL 3 couldn't be based on Vulkan Vulkan is a very

I think your argument shows why the web is such a poor platform in many areas. Second, there's no reason WebGL 3 couldn't be based on Vulkan Vulkan is a very low level API designed for ultra-high performance use in engines written by professional engine teams, like Unreal. It requires the developer to write large quantities of code to even render a single triangle because you have to take manual control over the GPUs low level details. To a large extent it's preferred to GL because of better interaction with multi-threading. It'd make no technical sense to try and expose a low level hardware-oriented API designed for multi-threading to a slow single-threaded language like JavaScript. Do you pick the 3D standard used on Windows, or do you pick the lower-end one used by iOS and Android (and can be made to work on Windows)? Somehow C++ does not have this problem. So how about: don't pick, expose all of them and let the developer use whichever is more appropriate? You say you don't see any alternative to how WebGL handles driver extensions. Of course there are alternatives: just expose them all. Let there be vendor specific and proprietary stuff in web apps. Just because this is considered politically unacceptable by the ideologues who control the web platform does not mean it's actually unthinkable. But that'd be against how the web is "designed" (browser makers cabalistically picking winners). So in fact, I will continue to bet against the web and against mobile. People have been predicting total domination of iPhone/iPad since the day they were launched. I'll still be playing AAA games on consoles or high end Windows PCs 10 years from now, I'm sure of it.