WebGL in Internet Explorer | Hacker News Reader

WebGL in Internet Explorer

blog.virtualglobebook.com

17 pointsmurz7 comments

a work-in-progress that implements WebGL with Canvas

That's a neat hack but it is absolutely not going to work in any practical sense. There is already a many orders of magnitude performance gap, and depth buffering will at least add yet another order of magnitude.

Also, canvas only supports affine texture mapping, as opposed to perspective-correct 3D mapping. This looks completely ridiculous for many common cases:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Perspective_correct_textur...

And, canvas can't cleanly stitch textured polygons together, so there will be visible seams everywhere.

I don't mean to be a killjoy, but I think one would find this endeavor very discouraging in the end.

"I'm still confident that Microsoft will add WebGL support to IE" - hmm! Really?

I think Microsoft will.

Yes, Microsoft has opposed it so far. But WebGL is gaining traction and will soon be enabled in all web browsers but IE. Interesting websites using it are starting to appear, and that will only accelerate.

So Microsoft will lose out by being the only browser not supporting a useful technology. People will prefer other browsers. Where Microsoft has nothing to lose by implementing WebGL.

Won't it be WebDirectX then? DirectX is a direct competitor to OpenGL.

But WebDirectX would benefit Microsoft in no way. It would be a proprietary extension to the web. It would not let IE run WebGL websites.

Microsoft has recently seen the light when it comes to web standards - the latest versions of IE are very standards-compliant.

I agree that Microsoft hates OpenGL, and promotes DirectX in any way it can. But Microsoft also used to hate JavaScript and HTML, and tried to get people to develop in .NET on the web (Silverlight). But it has shifted to actually supporting the standards-based web. WebGL is part of that web.

Even if they made WebDirectX, people would just write WebGL wrappers.

I think if it comes to it, Microsoft will invent WebDirectX under the guise it's for Windows 8 metro apps, and simply left it on in IE10. 3D on the web is a niche so it doesn't make their browser uncompetitive. Besides, they can also claim "you can do the same thing in WebDirectX anyway, just use that" - and they don't have to be seen supporting OpenGL (who cares if anyone writes wrappers? they don't have to pretend WebGL is a good idea).

For the record, it's an utterly backward and damaging thing to do to the web, but they'll do it anyway.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com