3D Web hits the big time: Google Maps on WebGL | Hacker News Reader

3D Web hits the big time: Google Maps on WebGL

news.cnet.com

60 pointsstevefink18 comments

> At present, the Firefox beta and Chrome support WebGL

Um, Firefox has supported WebGL in release builds for quite a long time now.

Yes, but it seems Google doesn't let Firefox access MapsGL yet. Your guess as to why...

It works in my Firefox 8 (which is indeed beta). I can't think of a reason in particular, but there was probably something added in Firefox 8 that it needs (eg full CORS support or something)

edit: yep: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/WebGL/Cross-Domain_Textures (at least, that is an important WebGL feature coming in Firefox 8)

You are correct; CORS texture support is required for WebGL maps.

Here is a Chrome extension that will modify existing pages built with the Google maps API v3 to enable it:

https://github.com/broady/ForceWebGL

It looks like WebGL maps have their own GPU exclusion list, or something. I launched Chrome with --ignore-gpu-blacklist and WebGL maps still refuses to run.

Chrome 14, Intel Mobile 4, Ubuntu 11.04

sadly, didn't work on my 2011 MBA with chrome 15 beta.

I concur, which is silly as webgl works great on the MBA.

We do not have an exclusion list, but we do run a micro-benchmark on your machine to ensure your GPU will be powerful enough to handle MapsGL. You can try upgrading your drivers as well, which sometimes improves performance (looks like intel put out new device drivers for that chip about a year ago)

You could try enabling the "Override software rendering list" option in about:flags, although that is probably the same as the --ignore-gpu-blacklist option.

It was news to me that Safari supports WebGL -- the "Enable WebGL" option was sitting up there in the Develop menu all this time when I've been switching to Chrome for WebGL pages.

Too bad WebGL doesn't work on my linux box

Works very well on my weak laptop GPU.

It actually seems smoother than the regular canvas implementation. Plus there are nice transition effects.

Not sure how practical it is though, but I do like the idea of shifting graphics intensive work to the GPU.

Does this have IE6 - IE8 support?

Sorry, this will only work in browsers that support WebGL, so Chrome and FF7+ for now.

this does not support ff7

Sure, just install the ChromeFrame plugin!

No, nor IE9 support. Nor IE10 even. Microsoft isn't too keen on WebGL.

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