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Comment by skywal_l | Hacker News Reader

To be clear, this article is triggered by the fact that Safari, the only major browser that did not support WebGL2, has landed support a few months ago.

This was the major roadblock for WebGL2 acceptance of developpers looking to support all major browsers.

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I can't believe it's actually happening - I was resigned to the fact it was dead.

I once (4 years ago, sheesh) made a "Pure-JS, no-build-step-required Minecraft Thing": https://github.com/mrspeaker/webgl2-voxels

When I made it I needed to specify it "Requires ES6 modules and WebGL2 support." At the time I was sure WebGL2 was going to be widely available soon and that ES6 modules would probably never be supported!

Looks great!

Wow! A simple 3D game in 425KB.

For me, google.com is 1.47MB. It makes you wonder what they put inside.

This is not the world we wished for, but this is the world we deserve.

Nah, we don't deserve it. We just don't have a choice at this point until someone is capable of creating an alternative to JavaScript.

Nah, we don't deserve it. We just don't have a choice at this point until someone is capable of creating an alternative to JavaScript.

Didn't you mean "an alternative to Google?"

Don't blame the tool for the (lack of) craftsmanship.

It has nothing to do with Google and everything to do with JavaScript.

The issue isn’t JS. Sites are bloated because cheap/lazy/dont care. Also because ads are bloating and payload size isnmt really thought about much.

The issue is JavaScript unless you're talking about people that use BMP image format instead of JPG/SVG.

You are asking for an alternative for browsers and 30 years of evolution. Be careful what you wish for :)

Way too many abstractions.

You got me wondering what was going on - 425Kb seemed pretty high. I imagined there would only be around 50K of non-compressed source code. Turns out the 200Kb+ culprit is the texture atlas I nabbed off the internet: https://github.com/mrspeaker/webgl2-voxels/blob/master/res/m... - I'm only using a handful of cells out of that, I should chop it!

You know what would be fun? Trying to program a bot to clear all the titles using the same interface as humans (WASD + Mouse + Vision). That could even be a competition.

That looks pretty simple. Is there anything you're doing that wouldn't be possible in WebGL 1?

Nothing at all - rewriting it for WebGL1 would be trivial (if you rely on OES_vertex_array_object being present). But really it was just me learning, and I naively assumed WebGL2.0 would be ready "any day now". The only non-supporting browser was Safari. That was 4+ years ago!

Thank you for sharing. Appears you did not pick a license - I'd recommend just releasing under MIT unless you have any particular preferences (it's a well-understood "do what you want" license that I believe is suitable for educational content).

This is excellent news. For years it was the only major browser with no WebGL 2 support : Chrome and Firefox support WebGl 2 since 2017 ... Most WebGL libraries have WebGL 1 fallbacks only to make apps run on Safari.

Does it really work?

We are using a WebGl plugin and recently it broke on Safari, we had to detect this new Safari version and downgrade the users to a 2D mode (it was a third party plugin so I can't debug it)

That would certainly be a cute trick to look like they are helping but actually be taking a step backward.

It's worth bearing in mind that the Safari major version and OS version are tied together.

Latest Safari cannot be used by users who cannot run the latest MacOS on their hardware, or have reasons not to (such as bricking risk with latest MacOS on old hardware.)

(I imagine it's similar with iOS but I'm not sure.)

You can get the latest Safari for Big Sur and Catalina too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safari_(web_browser)#Safari_15

This is not correct, you can update to the latest version of Safari on all supported versions of macOS. Currently, Safari 15 is available all the way back to macOS Catalina (from 2019...)

"all the way back"

This is part of the problem with the world of computing today. When a software released not quite 2 years and 4 months ago is referred to with the phrase "all the way back". Don't get me wrong, I'm all for keeping things as up-to-date as is reasonable, but the industry has far too much churn in many areas.

2019 is _ancient_ in terms of web browsers... What you call churn is actually mostly moving the web platform forward and fixing exploits. There's no way for the modern web to work without the rapidity of development browsers are undergoing.

Pretty sure that's the OS we're talking about, macOS Catalina 10.15? I am running it right now, and not pining for the new shininess of the more recent OS releases. If it wasn't still getting security updates, sure (but I've got a few more months, at least).

For MacOS this is not true. You will get Safari stable decoupled from the operating system going back two versions (Catalina and Big Sur). What you cannot run is Safari Technology Preview, that is available only for the current OS version.

Thanks, I didn't know that.

(That version range still seems quite restrictive though.)

You have it backwards, there is no separate installation of Safari for iOS or iPadOS, it only comes as part of an OS upgrade. Major (named) macOS updates come with a new version of Safari but it is also available to install on the two previous major versions of macOS. The current version, macOS Monterey (v12), came with Safari 15 and Safari 15 is also available for macOS Big Sur (v11) and macOS Catalina (v10.15).

The iPhone 6s was released in 2015 yet can run the latest version of iOS released in 2021. It probably won't be able to run the 2022 version of iOS but at that point it will have been seven years. I'm sure Android can't be updated for that long, I don't know if a current browser for Android can be run on a seven year old version of Android.

The latest version of Firefox (97) at least claims to run on Android 5.0 which is from 2014. It runs fine on my Retroid Pocket which is on Android 6. So at the very least that's available.

EDIT: Chrome 98 also works on Android 6.

The current version of Chrome can run on a version of Android that was released in 2014, meaning it can run on devices released in 2013.

> Latest Safari cannot be used by users who cannot run the latest MacOS on their hardware

Yes it can - pretty sure my daughter's old Mac running Mojave got an update to the newest Safari a few days ago.

I’ve been developing in WebGL for the last year on a Mac and can’t help but notice that Firefox and Chrome have much better performance (fps) than Safari. I would’ve thought Safari on Mac hardware would work best.

Does anyone know where these performance differences stem from?

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