Browsers will always lag behind desktop applications by a decade or two because everything is designed by committee and takes forever to arrive (see e.g. SSE, A

Browsers will always lag behind desktop applications by a decade or two because everything is designed by committee and takes forever to arrive (see e.g. SSE, AVX, GPGPU compute). And even if everyone can eventually agree on and implement the smallest common denominator hardware will already have evolved beyond that. In addition, browsers have to fight all kinds of nefarious attackers, so it is a very hostile environment to develop in. For example, we can't even measure time accurately (or do proper multithreading with shared memory) in the browser thanks to the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities. https://meltdownattack.com/ https://meltdownattack.com/ That being said, WebGL implements extremely gimped shaders. Yet, they are still more than enough to render all kinds of functions. For example, see https://www.shadertoy.com/ https://www.shadertoy.com/ or https://glslsandbox.com/ https://glslsandbox.com/ which are huge collections of functions which take screen coordinates and time as input and compute pixel colors from that, i.e. f(x, y, t) -> (r, g, b). This might sound not very impressive on first glance, but people have been amazingly creative within this extremely constrained environment, resulting in all kinds of fancy 3D renderings.