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Comment by nl | Hacker News Reader

Note that (only?) Chrome canary supports WebGPU so this won't yet work in most people's browsers.

They kindly provide instructions to run it (even on Apple M1).

hm. It seems it's been in firefox, pref'd off by default, for a few years now.. https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/04/experimental-webgpu-in-fir...

Thanks for the pointer! As far as we know the WebGPU development on firefox is a bit lagging behind, so we use Chrome and did not develop this project on firefox.

I downloaded Firefox nightly a couple of days ago, turned the flags on accordingly, but it didn't work out saying:

> Find an error initializing the WebGPU device TypeError: adapter.requestAdapterInfo is not a function

No idea how to fix it.

Well, based on the reply below, it sounds like they weren't testing in Firefox at all, so my guess is they were simply using APIs that only exist in Chrome right now. Whether those are actually necessary for the SD implementation, no idea.

Submitted a question in Firefox support forum, and there seems some bugs blocking it from running smoothly: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1408328

Ah. Thanks for following up. I see it's mentioning there was a regression bug in v111 in that particular call, so I guess could use an older version. I'm going to subscribe to the bug too.

Webgpu will ship this year, so it will be more widely available pretty soon

It took 10 years for WebGL to be widely available, and it is still barely used beyond some niche use cases like 3D models in ecommerce, or Flash's revenge when coupled with WASM.

With WebGPU it will be faster - libraries like ThreeJS will use WebGPU when possible.

ThreeJS doesn't even has a good alternative to having a complete incompatible shading language, other than switching to graphical based shaders.

Do you expect everyone to rewrite 10 years of shaders just for fun?

Yes.

There is an origin trial. They should enable that, then it would work in Chrome stable today. It's only supported on Windows and Mac right now though, I think.

WebGPU comes out April 26th - then 65% of the worlds web browsers will have access to it.

Super interesting! Do you have a source on this? A quick search didn‘t turn up anything for me

Reply on news.ycombinator.com