14 DAY TRIAL // As the web becomes increasingly complex, people are trying to push the limits of what it can do. Browser makers build new technologies and developers find new ways of taking advantage of them.
But, as the web begins to replace traditional operating systems it's encountering some of the typical problems of traditional operating systems as well.
The finest example of this is WebGL. Cross platform, hardware accelerated graphics available to web developers via standard means sounds too good to be true.
Well, it is too good to be true, anything that involves 3D graphics and low level access to hardware is going to run into issues with drivers, compatibility and all the hell related to that.
That's exactly what browser makers have stumbled into with WebGL. Firefox and Chrome, the two browsers that come with WebGL support enabled by support, maintain a blacklist of graphic cards as well as driver versions for each platform they run on.
In fact, a small number of devices running only recent drivers actually get WebGL support.
But even this isn't enough, as the name suggests, WebGL is based on the OpenGL 3D graphics standard. That's fine for Linux and Mac OS X, but it's not so great for Windows where the de facto 3D graphics API is DirectX.
This is why projects like Google's ANGLE are very important. ANGLE was created with a very simple purpose, albeit one that's rather hard to pull off.
In essence, ANGLE is a OpenGL 'emulator' for DirectX, it enables web apps to issue standard OpenGL requests which are 'translated' and then run via Direct X on Windows rather than the OpenGL API.
This is needed because OpenGL support is spotty on Windows and offers nowhere near the performance DirectX does.
Google has announced that ANGLE has passed the OpenGL ES 2.0 test suite and ANGLE 1.0 is certified as GL ES 2.0 compliant. This means that you can use any feature part of the GL ES 2.0 standard and be sure it will work via ANGLE.
"ANGLE helps Chrome use a single, open graphics standard and remain portable across platforms. Because it's a standalone library, open-source project ANGLE can help other software projects in the same way. Firefox, for instance, is already using ANGLE to render WebGL content on Windows," Google explained.