Hacker News Reader

Comment by rprospero | Hacker News Reader

I was a little surprised that Linux and iOs were the worst Desktop and Mobile adoption points. Of course, mobile was slightly cheating, as I doubt that that RimOS stats are significant. Still considering that they found zero support from IE, it's amazing that Windows still beats Linux. I'm guessing it's a driver issue?

View on HN

It isn't surprising at all that Linux is behind. Most linux graphic drivers are in bad state and are blacklisted by both Chrome and Firefox, I use linux by the way. As for iOS, Safari mobile doesn't support WebGL (iAds do), so neither are surprising.

I guess that I was just surprised by the combination of probabilities. I would have thought that the percentage of Windows users using IE was greater than the percentage of Linux users with poor graphics drivers. Being an occasional Linux user myself, I was probably more surprised how far IE had fallen than that the Linux support for 3D is flaky.

As for iOS, I wasn't aware of the Safari mobile versus iAds thing. That seems like an odd tech decision, but I guess it makes sense.

Maybe they could just not blacklist.. I think its bullshit.

I'd much rather blacklisting than having web-code be able to crash my entire window system, or even just my browser.

(That said, I'm one of the few people lucky enough to have Intel graphics hardware, so I have pretty great Linux drivers. I might feel differently if I were forced to use something from nVidia or ATi.)

I am currently in the "no support" zone with my linux because I bought this !#@$!itty nVidia card with the optimus technology. The "we will never support it under linux" kind. So I can see WebGL website but it requires me to restart my navigator in a mode that drains my batteries quicker.

This is probably not the case of the majority but I think that people with this kind of problem are still numerous.

If it makes you happier, Optimus has the same issues under Windows. But you are quite lucky that you can use your nvidia card at all, I couldn't get unofficial driver running. I personally liked the early Optimus releases which allowed to turn off that damn thing in the BIOS. I'm perfectly happy with my battery being drained, I just want to be sure which card is used and how.

Take a look at the bumblebee project. They allowed me to get normal graphical acceleration.

I believe every single desktop browser besides IE has WebGL support by now. IE10 won't have it either. Maybe IE11.

Or maybe IE-never. The official reason is "WebGL is unsafe"[1]. The unofficial is, of course, "We hate OpenGL and we would rather force our own, unsafe Silverlight 3D"[2].

[1] http://news.softpedia.com/news/Internet-Explorer-Won-t-Be-Su...

[2] http://games.greggman.com/game/webgl-security-and-microsoft-...

You've to keep in mind that a lot of Linux users (myself included) have NoScript turned on when browsing Internet.

Doesn't iOS currently restrict WebGL to iAds? I was surprised to see it above 0% on iOS.

Well, someone found a hack to make it work in embedded web views that aren't iAd, but yes. It might be internal Apple testing...?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com