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Comment by smallblacksun | Hacker News Reader

>but our conversations with the developers of the drivers in question make us confident that they’re as committed as us and Microsoft to a robust and secure experience for our shared users

ATI and NVidia have never cared about driver stability (or anything other than benchmark performance), and now we're supposed to believe that they will start caring about security?

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I wouldn't say that about the ATI driver folks. Back when I was running a small team at MSFT, we were the first serious users of the then-new WPF text rendering APIs that were built on top of the new driver models. So, we hit bugs. The ATI on-site folks were awesome. Usually, they had already found the bugs and had a patch that was going through stability testing. When they didn't know about it, one of them would come by, usually within a couple of hours, and connect up a kernel debugger or whatever else was needed to track down the bug and turn us around a fix. I still prefer AMD video cards to this day based on that experience.

ATI and NVidia surely cares about driver stability. Who would buy their graphics cards if the games kept crashing all the time?

ATI and NVidia didn't have to care about security before, since the only applications that could access the drivers and graphics cards were trusted applications. Now we have a new situation where they they have to start to care about security. I don't think AMD or NVidia want to be blacklisted in WebGL implementations because their driver isn't secure enough.

I don't think AMD or NVidia want to be blacklisted in WebGL implementations because their driver isn't secure enough.

Only one or the other could get blacklisted. If it was both of them, what remains? The Sandy Bridge GPU? WebGL needs them more than they need WebGL.

Based on face-to-face conversations with senior people at GPU manufacturers, I do, yes. You should absolutely decide for yourself; I said what our belief was, and what it was based on.

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