This is a web page - Mozilla WebGL demo "No Comply"

I restarted Firefox and it worked well until the last minute or so then it started getting choppy again. Neither my memory or CPU was spiking much and I was on discrete graphics the whole time.

In the latest version of Chrome and Firefox, I only get a black screen, so I can't comment on the effort it took them for something a very small portion of the online public will see (funny, I heard "HTML5" was supposed to about making things easier to access across a variety of browsers and platforms).

But I guess that's just me and developers, creative thinkers, and creators will think that black box is the coolest thing ever.

I've been making 3d animations since 1996, websites since 1998, and compiled software since 2005. I've been employed in these capacities for the majority of my working life. So I'm speaking as a developer familiar with every aspect of a project like this. I know the amount of work that goes in to pioneering new technologies and the practical methodologies that capitalize on them. I realize that WebGL (et al.) is new, and presents challenges both technical and artistic surpassed only by the their afforded opportunities for new creative expression.

I can clearly see the tremendous amount of effort that went into realizing this. But given that effort, shouldn't there have been greater regard given to the quality of the finished product? For instance, there's no technical limitation which accounts for the length of the demo, nor is there any benefit to that length. If the piece had been of a more concise focus, the artists involved may have been able to create imagery was as visually stunning as it was technically impressive. Instead, the graphical elements feel quite unpolished, dated, and they detract from the impact of the project. This is but one of many examples of how I feel this piece is a failure to deliver on this technology's potential.

Certainly, the content of the work isn't as important as the technical systems needed to realize it. But if the purpose of such a demo is to show off what many splendours await us in this new era of the internet, wouldn't it be prudent to ensure that this demo actually works as expected? Why are so many people with Firefox 4 failing to run it? Why did it take me 5 tries to load the page? This isn't progress.

It bothers me that so much effort went into something that comes very close to a level where the average consumer would be impressed, but falls short because of a lack of ability to execute. If this were a commercial product, the market would slaughter you. And while I realize that tech demos aren't commercial products in and of themselves, they're still marketing something. A technology, a technique, a browser.

The recent advances in the web (CSS3, WebGL, HTML5, etc) are focused on improving online experiences. The biggest part of this is that they make it ever easier for all developers to create beautiful work. So it just bothers me to no end that people working on the forefront of this movement have such little regard for the beauty of their work. They're the ones carving the path. They should be showing us the new highs we may hit, on every level. They should be leading by example. There's no reason this tech demo couldn't have been as visually stunning as, say, the websites for 2advanced were back in the early days of Flash.

As long as a Flash solution like Papervision3D would provide a superior realtime 3d experience to a majority of web surfers (if this demo is anything to go by), we're not yet at the Web Page Of The Future.

Firefox unfortunately has an explicit whitelist on Linux for drivers it allows for WebGL, because they didn't want to hit driver/GL bugs that crashed the browser. More unfortunately, the whitelist in Firefox 4 doesn't include the Intel driver, even though it works fine and doesn't crash. I worked with upstream to provide the necessary information about the driver, and Firefox 5 should have the Intel driver on the whitelist. In the meantime, try running "MOZ_GLX_IGNORE_BLACKLIST=1 firefox" from the command line.

The important part is the direction. I have always been a naysayer for the "browser is the platform", but this is convincing in terms of potential. Finally.