There's a WebGL talk at WWDC 2014
blog.playcanvas.com
blog.playcanvas.com
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/178587-firefox-is-still...
Most of the security issues we encounter are with bugs in the driver. A common bug for example with the Intel mac driver is when sending allocating a valid large texture the texture will sometimes instead be filled with old gpu memory[1]. Then you can glReadPixel the data and reconstruct parts of the desktop windows or tabs. A sandbox isn't going to stop you from exploiting this kind of buggy driver if it incorrectly starts returning other people's data when you asking for unrelated valid commands.
"... The [Servo] engine processes will use the operating system sandboxing facilities to restrict access to system resources."
What really?
Were they seriously even pretending to use that excuse?
Everyone I've ever talked to was 100% certain it was simply because they didn't want anyone by-passing the app store for games and other immersive content they would then have no control over.
I'm not denying that webgl is an attack surface; it totally is; but surely it's a bit rich to say that the webgl implementation in webkit has been switched off for the last 3 years because of security concerns.
If that was the only reason to not having feature parity with other OS's, they'd have some something about it.. oh, you know. 2-3 years ago.
Well, "everyone you ever talked to" was wrong. Apple could not care less about web apps by-passing the app store in this regard.
For one, they initially offered web apps in place of a native API, and developers (and users) hated it.
Second, they had for the longest time (still do IIRC), the fastest and more complete web browser experience on mobile. Including extra JS hooks for things like the accelerometer and such. Strange coming from a company concerned about the web apps by-passing the app store.
Third, most iOS developers don't pericularly want web apps. The App Store has half a billion of credit cards on the ready, and gives billions of dollars to developers each year. It will be extremely difficult to try to monetize some web based game for iOS users. Plus it offers far better performance (and possibilities for integration) than some Javascript/WebGL game.
Fourth, WebGL is not that great a deal on the desktop web yet (even most casual games prefer the canvas API or Flash still), so why would it be on the mobile web?
>If that was the only reason to not having feature parity with other OS's, they'd have some something about it.. oh, you know. 2-3 years ago.
Well, those other OSes, namely Android, just enabled WebGL in their Chrome browser 9 months ago. And, oh you know, that in the beta version of the broswer. In fact, "Can I Use It", still shows only partial support for WebGL, and for the first time available just in the latest Android Chrome version: http://caniuse.com/webgl
This never made sense to me as an explanation, if only because for a very long time iOS had a far more sophisticated browser than Android; Android only really reached feature parity with Chrome for Android, and for years iOS was a much better platform for webapps. If they were so protective of the app store, they would hardly have put so much effort into best-in-class modern web support; offline web apps are in principle as much a threat to the app store as webgl stuff.
Well, it's much, much faster, and they've added plenty of stuff since IOS4 (web sockets, for instance, which it had a fair while before Chrome for Android).
It's not like Apple's been a major engineering company in the center of some meaningful tech discussions (RFCs, open source projects sometimes, etc) for 30+ years. Not respecting other people's technical decisions really just hampers/hinders good collaborative work and conversation (especially about security) getting done.
This blogger spotted a talk at WWDC 2014 on WebGL. He speculates this means there's a forthcoming release of Safari with WebGL enabled by default, thus predicting Apple is embracing WebGL.
But we don't actually know that.
The HN guidelines call for changing titles when they're linkbait or misleading.
This will signal the true start of the WebGL era, because the lack of WebGL on iOS has been a real buzz kill for commercial adoption of WebGL outside of pure enthusiastic circles -- I know this first hand unfortunately in trying to do B2B deals with http://Clara.io's interactive embed technology -- it is nearly impossible to sell to major clients once they realize that it doesn't work on iOS:
Although you probably don't need it anymore now that you have the remote rendering embeds :)
[1]: WebGL is enabled for iAds.
Right now implementing an HTML5 or JavaScript multiplayer game is still a considerable exercise in navigating browser differences.
So I will be satisfied even if Apple can only solve the most of these problems on desktop platform and make it on by default.
And a URL can map to some state/object too. Google can then think about searching for things richer than just textual.
HTML and WebGL are mostly orthogonal. For example, you do not want to render text or form controls in WebGL.
We can improve HTML rendering with GPU-accelerated compositing, but that's mostly behind the scenes.
You don't. I don't. Our users don't. But trust me, there are plenty of ex-Flash devs out there positively ITCHING for a return to the days of un-navigable custom UI elements.
I am thinking of something like the LivelyKernel[0] or better.
Think GMail, think Pandora - neither of which parses logically as a document, but are made from HTML: horribly hacky, horribly complex HTML at that.
It would seem to me that we're making HTML do something it was never meant to do, and that there are many applications on the web today that really don't need that stack at all, and really just need code and a renderer (like, say, a desktop OS).
Of course, this is a double edged sword. Simply tossing a renderer to devs is just going to invite a whole slew of confusing, non-standard UIs. Though, that said, if you look at GMail et al, we're already there.