Opera (finally) gets hard on WebGL 3D

Opera Software has released the first public build of its desktop browser that includes 3D hardware acceleration based on the WebGL standard. The company announced the Windows preview build with a blog post on Monday, after two years of work on WebGL. "We have been working on a WebGL implementation since early 2009, when the …

[Anomalous Cowturd]

Opera. Been the best browser for years, by far... For me...

Long time satisfied user. Firefox crawls on the same machine. Don't want Google watching my URLs, so no Chrome. IE, on Wine. Nah!

Cue the down votes in 3,2,1...

Lighten up folks. Each to their own, and all that. What what!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Each to their own, and all that.

With an attitude like that you won't be welcome in these forums!

Surely you realise that your phone/OS/web browser define you as a person, and your choices REQUIRE you to abuse anyone who has made different choices?

Next you will say you have reached enlightenment and realise all hardware sucks with only the degree of suckiness varying and the only thing that can be relied on is for software to suck even more.

[Anomalous Cowturd]

@AC Re:Re: Each to their own, and all that.

I have been lurking in this forum for over five years, and posting for a few. Although I have attracted a few downvotes for occasional wanderings, I still feel my frequently sarcastic postings are generally received in the manner in which they were intended.

My phone, ZTE-Blade Android. OS = Ubuntu, Debian and Arch Linux + 1 XP Multi-Boot for "If I must" Apps. Browser = Opera or Firefox "If I must". All probably define me as a Geek. None of these preclude MY belief that others may have different needs or technological requirements. (ActiveX, JS, .Net etc...) Not that that matters to me.

Nor does it bother me, as a FOSS user and evangelist, that Opera is closed source. I would prefer them to open source their code, but it's their choice. They provide the BEST web browser for what I want it to do. e.g. Web browsing.

It is also a pretty darned good mail client, RSS reader, torrent client etc.

As for your last paragraph, well, my enlightenment came about twenty years ago when I forked out £400 for a 486 mobo, chip and 4 MB RAM. That was when I gave up the "Faster" race. Software sucks much less than it used to. Linux especially tends to just work with all but the latest tech. The prices are excellent, as is most of the software.

YMMV. ;o)

Trolls, trolling trolls...

[Robert Heffernan]

Uuh?

"Relatively few Windows machines support OpenGL"

I would say the overwhelming majority of Windows PCs with 3D accelerated graphics support OpenGL.

On the other hand relatively few Windows-only games (or xbox ports) support OpenGL.

[R.E.H.]

@Robert Heffernan

Microsoft doesn't ship OpenGL drivers with their OS these days, so ma and pa who never update drivers from the video card manufacturer's website don't have OpenGL support. This very likely accounts for a large majority of machines.

Also, Intel's 3D drivers for Windows have pretty abysmal OpenGL support, as I understand it. Not that Intel's 3D drivers for DirectX have a sterling reputation either; however, their chips are very common, because most people don't know any better, nor do they care to.

[Mr Brush]

> Microsoft doesn't ship OpenGL drivers with their OS

Erm, yes they do. The default OpenGL32.dll on Win95 through to XP provides GL1.1 support.

IIRC, Vista and Win7 even manage to support GL1.5 out of the box.

[Captain Scarlet]

Open GL2

I read Open GL2 on the article, not sure what version ATI and Nvidia include these days

[Greg J Preece]

In fairness to Opera

Beginning of 2009 to beginning of 2011 is two years, not three.

Where's the pedant icon...

[Anonymous Coward]

Working very well here

Has the same quirks as the 11.10 Barracuda alpha snapshot, so not really suitable for daily use just yet, but as baracuda progresses, hopefully this one will be updated.

It's blisteringly fast when it works, and the whole UI is rendered using it, which is nice. I had a problem with one machine falling back to software mode, even though there was suitable OpenGL drivers in place, so it's not 100% robust detection yet.

I'm glad Opera waited and gone for the full cross platform solution, as their software renderer keeps up with even the best hardware accelerated browsers, so there was no need to rush somthing out incomplete.

Also the Mac/Linux builds are coming very soon apparently.. (this article implies otherwise).

http://labs.opera.com/news/2011/02/28/

"this preview is currently only available for Windows – builds for other operating systems will be coming soon."

Opera also have a brand spanking new HTML5 parser too, which is interesting. It's also targetted at Opera 11.50

http://labs.opera.com/news/2011/02/22/

As always, Opera leading the pack in terms of technology.

[Chris 171]

Many, many good things already in Opera..

Looks like more is coming with this latest news.

Use it pretty much exclusively on all my web connected devices, I like fast.

Really dont get why it doesnt have as high penetration on the desktop (as it does with its mobile products) but I guess the other IE alts spend a lot more on advertising.

[Anonymous Coward]

Multi billion dollar advertising budgets

that is why.

Microsoft, Apple and Safari all have bottomless buckets of cash to push their inferior Browsers.

Mozilla just got lucky that at the time everyone wanted to jump from IE, they were the best known alternative. In 2011, there is not really any reason to still be using Firefox, but most users don't know any better.

[Andrew Norton]

mozilla also had

millions to throw at advertising.

They got, what, $2M in payoff when they were split off from AOL. That was spent on advertising. At the time I was being told about the wonders of Firefox on the radio all the time, and I lived in rural Georgia (although it might have been an Atlanta station I was listening to)

Then, the default homepage for Firefox is... Google

The default homepage for Opera is (for recent versions)... Speed-dial.

Is it any wonder Mozilla's been getting $50+M a year from Google, which then goes into more advertising (it sure as hell doesn't go into making their browser faster, or more robust).

Add in the idiot 'open source is everything' fanbois banging on about security (even though Firefox is far less secure than IE these days), or they're busy congratulating Firefox for all their achievements, when they're often the last one to the party, a party that's often been started by Opera.

Hope that helps answer things.

[Bronek Kozicki]

nice, but ...

... I can't afford to use a browser which can't handle ICC colour profiles. Which means I have little choice and Opera is not on the table (neither are few other popular browsers). I like it and I'd love to switch, but I also like my large, wide-gamut monitor and the pictures presented by Opera, without colour management, look awful.

[Anonymous Coward]

Opera

I have just invented another acronym - amongst my huge inventory of inventions.

BOSB

Bucket Of Shit Browser.

[Anonymous Coward]

BOSC

That's a Bucket Of Shit Comment.

Why the anti-Opera trolling anyway?

[unicomp21]

WebGL demo

Looks like a flight on an alient planet.

http://www.pcprogramming.com/flight.html

[Anonymous Coward]

An yet...

They seem utterly incapable of implementing basic Candidate Recommendation specs like this; http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-multicol/

[Anonymous Coward]

hmm

I have little to complain about Opera's support for web standards but CSS3 multicolumn support is indeed missed.

[Anonymous Coward]

Implementing basic RCs?

Failnonymous is of course neglecting to mention all the specs Opera has implemented that others haven't gotten around to yet.

Whining because of one single issue?

Epic fail.

[JDX]

Confused

I thought WebGL was for doing 3D rendering using JS as part of your client web-app. So why do they talk about WebGL as a way to hardware accelerate the browser itself, like how IE9 uses D3D? Surely those are two separate things.

[R.E.H.]

@Mr Brush

Oh yeah, OpenGL 1.1 with a software renderer. That's gonna do great. Go try running some OpenGL software on that, and check back in with me when you're done.

[Greg J Preece]

Two words

"Unreal" and "Tournament" ;-)