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The sad thing is that most of these issues have been around for a decade or more, and it feels like very little progress has been made aside from WebGPU almost

The sad thing is that most of these issues have been around for a decade or more, and it feels like very little progress has been made aside from WebGPU almost being usable now (still waiting for Safari and Firefox). Unreal Engine had a web target, again a decade ago, and ended up deprecating it because such little progress had been made in maturing the platform.

samiv 2y ago
I think a lot of these issues are simply unsolvable given the current web infrastructure and the way everything is designed against adversarial programs. Like nerfing the APIs, IPC handoffs and such. The only GPU workload that works well here is something that is nearly completely static, does nothing much than a single draw call and everything else is statically allocated and never changed. Essentially shadertoy (+ a bunch of similar demos) Edit: Must be a schizophrenic feeling to design Web APIs where you first design functionality that is useful for the web apps and then you find ways to amputate that functionality in the name of security.
- jsheard 2y ago
  WebGPU is a big step in the right direction for graphics but that's another place where progress has been glacially slow. I think the initiative started in 2016, it took until 2023 for Chrome to ship it, and Apple are still dragging their feet heading into 2025. WebGL was already severely dated at the start of that process and we're still stuck with WebGL for portable web graphics to this day!
  - fidotron 2y ago
    Honestly, WebGPU once available will become a total security disaster area, and that is contributing to the foot dragging. What was/is needed is a WebGL 2.5 that enables async access to the GL context. Arguably both of them should require permissions.
fidotron 2y ago
There were several console prototypes targeting HTML5 games over ten years ago, based mainly on the results of early emscripten work. It generated a lot of noise in some circles. Obviously they dissolved/morphed into quite different things.

samiv 2y ago

I think a lot of these issues are simply unsolvable given the current web infrastructure and the way everything is designed against adversarial programs. Like nerfing the APIs, IPC handoffs and such. The only GPU workload that works well here is something that is nearly completely static, does nothing much than a single draw call and everything else is statically allocated and never changed. Essentially shadertoy (+ a bunch of similar demos) Edit: Must be a schizophrenic feeling to design Web APIs where you first design functionality that is useful for the web apps and then you find ways to amputate that functionality in the name of security.

jsheard 2y ago
WebGPU is a big step in the right direction for graphics but that's another place where progress has been glacially slow. I think the initiative started in 2016, it took until 2023 for Chrome to ship it, and Apple are still dragging their feet heading into 2025. WebGL was already severely dated at the start of that process and we're still stuck with WebGL for portable web graphics to this day!
- fidotron 2y ago
  Honestly, WebGPU once available will become a total security disaster area, and that is contributing to the foot dragging. What was/is needed is a WebGL 2.5 that enables async access to the GL context. Arguably both of them should require permissions.

fidotron 2y ago

There were several console prototypes targeting HTML5 games over ten years ago, based mainly on the results of early emscripten work. It generated a lot of noise in some circles. Obviously they dissolved/morphed into quite different things.