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Comment by sceaj | Hacker News Reader

One of the differentiating factors of Wolfram|Alpha: Gone.

Google's doesn't require a 250mb plugin to become interactive (just a webgl capable browser...). And it seems to be about 8 times faster than W|A...

W|A still does a lot of things other sites don't do, but it tends to be unusably slow, and inconsistent (running same query twice in a row will sometimes not give all of the same results).

I figure the end is probably closer than one might expect for W|A. They don't seem to be moving quick enough to stay infront of the curve forever. Also, the site is becoming littered with obtrusive ads, and that's a pretty negative experience. (I also hear Wolfram's company may be struggling.)

This should have been praise for Google's new tool, but it turned into a rant on Wolfram|Alpha... whoops.

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Competition is good for both parties. Wolfram Alpha challenged Google to rethink what people search for to some degree, and Google's rigored performance should challenge Wolfram Alpha to become more performance aware and prevent them from taking too many features "premium".

And in the end, it is a win / win for users. I am always happy when the insanely smart people at Google have hard things to implement like this than how to integrate the posts of my friends on Google+ into my search results for a unicode table.

It's only a win-win if it doesn't do too much damage to wolfram alpha, although I guess if Google pushes too hard it will drive Wolfram to try to integrate more and more into Apple's ecosystem.

Wolfram Alpha also seems to bail out when a mathematical expression exceeds a certain complexity, which makes it fairly useless for the only thing I want to use it for - evaluating hairy integrals and other long expressions. Or worse, it just "interprets" it as a part of my original expression and calculates that, as if I just typed out the rest of it because I enjoy typing random symbols. It seems like such a waste to fire up Mathematica every time but I haven't found any comparable online tools.

I think W|A could have been a great tool for this kind of thing but instead it tried to cover every subject instead of doing one thing well.

If you just type in the expression as Mathematica code, doesn't Wolfram Alpha evaluate it just as Mathematica would?

Yes, but it times out rather quickly. Mathematica is much more powerful.

(For those interested: the relevant syntax is

    Integrate[x^2, x]

    Integrate[x^2, {x, 0, 1}]

You can find more Mathematica at http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/guide/Mathematica.h...; searching the Mathematica docs is often easier than figuring out which textual query Wolfram|Alpha understands.)

No not always. I've tried several times, but W|A pipes the input first trough the natural language processor. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=DateListPlot[++WeatherD...]

The nail in the coffin for me on W|A was requiring a login in order to copy plain text results. (Even though the same data is copyable in the DOM, they actually go out of their way to obscure it!)

I don't think people understand how noxious this registration-obession is, especially when you need utilize it to access basic functionality.

I don't really go to W|A anymore unless there's something specifically math or statistics related that I'm looking for. That action killed any kind of casual use for me.

Of course, since this is a Google result, it can just fail and say "3D charts require a web browser and system that support WebGL." Which is super useful to me.

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic about it being super useful. If you are, it seems easier still to download Chrome to do a 3d render then it is to buy WA pro and download an apparently enormous plugin to do the same render

He might mean that this computer doesn't have a card/driver combo capable of running WebGL. This is actually fairly common from test Mozilla has carried out. Successfull WebGL context creation on Windows were bellow 70% (can't find the actual page with the real numbers right now).

But Chrome now supports software rendering through swiftshaders which should help those people.

I for one agree with you, even with the issue of webgl capable hardware is much better than having to deal with huge plugins. (I'm biased, I use WebGL for my current work).

I simply didn't understand. His post doesn't say anything about WebGL not being supported by his GPU specifically, though obviously that's a problem. I guess I don't know what he wants? Yes, if your browser and system isn't supported... what do you want? Do we expect Google to have to support every user, for every nonessential, nonrevenue-producing feature?

Maybe I'm just missing something, but it seems I was punished for asking.

You were making unfounded assumptions (that enabling WebGL would be as trivial as installing Chrome) and at the same time ignored the fact that you get highly useful results from WA without any plugins or bleeding-edge tech. Having good fallbacks is important.

Yikes. A lot of 'you' accusations there.

>You were making unfounded assumptions (that enabling WebGL would be as trivial as installing Chrome)

No, I made the point that installing Chrome is trivial and the message explicitly states that your system simply might not be capable. If that's the case, what is Google supposed to do? Just render an empty grid and make a "whah-wha" noise?

>at the same time ignored the fact that you get highly useful results from WA without any plugins or bleeding-edge tech

No I didn't. At all. I am not saying this is an "answer" or a competitor to WolframAlpha. This is a trivial feature that was thrown in. It's non-essential and I bet you'll never ever see Google pushing a browser plugin on any of their sites save for some existing exceptions (Talk). As you've noted, there are tons of places to go besides Google for a 3d graph.

>Having good fallbacks is important.

When it doesn't require confusing your user, or compromising standards to ask them to install a gargantuan plugin.

edit: If the whole point of this was merely to clean up the error message or simply suppress it on unsupported browsers, then sure, but like I said, I genuinely just didn't understand the sarcasm, my apologies.

"No I didn't. At all. "

Yes you did:

"it seems easier still to download Chrome to do a 3d render then it is to buy WA pro "

That's why you were corrected. Stop trying to defend this forever and move on.

>That's why you were corrected. Stop trying to defend this forever and move on.

Oh for god's sake, give it a rest. I thought (and have clarified this twice now) that it was simply a remark about (in)capable browsers. I clarified (also twice) that if it's about the error message on incapable computers, that it could be better written and I apologized for my confusion.

For many people getting that error, simply installing Chrome is a viable solution.

>If the whole point of this was merely to clean up the error message or simply suppress it on unsupported browsers, then sure, but like I said, I genuinely just didn't understand the sarcasm, my apologies.

That's why I clarified and apologized (hint, that's the post you just replied to). Stop trying to attack me forever (for what I even acknowledged at the time was probably a misunderstanding) and move on.

Well, if I was Google, I probably wouldn't make an error message the top search result.

I am running Chrome on a Thinkpad, so it's not like I can actually do anything to fix the error.

If your 3D stack is working (ie not stuck with an abandoned ATI/AMD card), try upgrading to Firefox. Chromium fails for me too.

You basically equated the hassle of getting WebGL working if someone is on a browser without it to the hassle of getting Wolfram Alpha Pro.

What you are missing is that if you don't have Wolfram Alpha Pro, the regular plain old Wolfram Alpha still plots it for you. It gives you a 3D view and a contour map, and throws in a couple series expansion and the derivative. You don't get the fancy interactivity without Pro, but you get to see what the thing is.

At Google, on the other hand, you either get the full 3D interactive experience, or you get "3D charts require a web browser and system that support WebGL".

This is actually fairly common from test Mozilla has carried out. Successfull WebGL context creation on Windows were bellow 70% (can't find the actual page with the real numbers right now).

[Disclaimer: I know absolutely nothing about the internals of WebGL, and I don't mean this to come off as a criticism.]

Does anyone know why it's so hard to get WebGL working on a lot of systems?

I'm just sort of surprised; I remember doing a lot of OpenGL projects many years ago (back when I still used Windows), and I never seemed to have any problems getting them running pretty much anywhere, regardless of graphics card or whatever. Even crappy systems with integrated graphics always seemed to do just fine.

Is there something about WebGL that makes it more difficult to support a lot of systems, or is it just that it's relatively new and nobody's gotten to adding support yet?

Ironically, I was using Chrome and got that error. Then I tried Firefox and it worked.

its because in chrome webgl is currently disabled by default. you can turn it on on about:flgs IIRC. or try any other release channel. It worked for me in canary.

I get the same using Chrome. It seems that there is no support for ATI/AMD cards on Linux: https://support.google.com/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&an...

Firefox (11) has no such issues and renders just fine for me.

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