WebGL: Interwebs 3D tech emerges from puberty

WebGL – the emerging standard that provides hardware-accelerated 3D inside the browser –  has reached the 1.0 milestone. On Thursday, media-happy standards organization The Khronos Group announced the final 1.0 release of the WebGL specification, which maps JavaScript to the existing OpenGL desktop graphics interface. "We've …

[Ben Liddicott]

Great! A new way for malware to exploit our browsers!

Buffer overflow access straight into kernel mode too!

Sorry, I forgot - many eyes make all bugs shallow. This will be perfect because it is open source, and created by the altruistic geniuses of the FOSS bazaar. Or by Google Work For Hire oompa loompas. Whichever is best!

Cough (openssl) Cough!

[Anonymous Coward]

You're still better than

if you use proprietary closed source from one well known big software vendor where you have to pay for the privilege of allowing malware purveyors to ruin your computing experience.

I also gave you a down vote for this negative attitude toward end user freedoms.

[Ben Liddicott]

Ah, downvoted for being politically incorrect?

As opposed to, you know, wrong?

Not leaving your name, coward?

[Paul Shirley]

OpenGL not rare on Windoze

As far as I can tell OpenGL support is widespread on Windows, certainly every NVidia and ATI/AMD driver has it built it and even Intel's woeful chipsets do a passable imitation. It's been many years since we had to install separate OpenGL over the base graphics drivers. ID saw to that by building so many essential games on OpenGL.

Despite Microsoft's sometimes desperate attempts to kill it, OpenGL 1 & 2 is near universally available. Even if under the hood they sometimes had to layer it over DirectX to sidestep Microsoft ;)

[Charlie Clark]

You forgot to mention

Opera added hardware support for Windows, drivers permitting, in a labs build on 28th February.

http://my.opera.com/core/blog/2011/02/28/webgl-and-hardware-acceleration-2

WebGL isn't likely to set the world on fire just yet unless Hollywood insists that webm 3d is the only way to go but hardware support for Open GL will make some things like overlays work a lot better.

[The Brave Sir Robin]

It's been years....

...since I last encountered a Windows PC without OpenGL drivers automatically included with their graphics drivers. Good job really since my company sells software which relies heavily on OpenGL graphics. We've not had problems with missing OpenGL drivers since the Windows 9x and NT 4 days.

[Tom 7]

And you forgot to mention

the MPEG-LA and others may just threaten to sue if you use Open GL to move any shapes around.

Just hope this: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703752404576178833590548792.html?mod=WSJASIA_hpp_LEFTTopWhatNews

leads to a put up or shut up resolution and we can get on with building a world where some prat cant patent the obvious and hold everyone else back for 25 years.

[FoolD]

Windows machines rarely ship with OpenGL ... eh ?

All windows desktop OSes (XP and above) do ship with OpenGL - all-be-it using a software renderer (GDI generic implementation) until a proper graphics driver is installed. Windows server OS don't ; but they're not exactly the norm for web surfers.

If you mean rarely ship with a full OpenGL 2.0 implementation then you may be correct (as the generic software renderer is only 1.1 compliant). Even then though the basic OpenGL calls should work, just not post 1.1 extensions (which should degrade gracefully if coded correctly).

If the PC ships with proprietary drivers (which many do) then it will most likely have full hardware accellerated OpenGL (upto 3.x) ready to go out of the box...