14 DAY TRIAL // There's a great trend to move everything online these days. It's not exactly clear if this is a good thing in all circumstances, but everyone's getting on the bandwagon and there's no reversing it at this point. One problem, a big one, with doing everything in a browser is that the performance and functionality sees a significant dive. On the performance front, there's been a lot of attention to JavaScript speed in browsers, and on the functionality one, we have the WebGL project which aims to bring hardware-accelerated 3D graphics to browsers. Development is moving fast and the standard has been released in draft form with a finalized version possibly coming in early 2010.
“Even without a draft specification of WebGL in circulation, we’ve seen some promising 3D content using WebGL appear on the web, put together mainly through developer ingenuity and the fact that Firefox, Chromium, and WebKit are open source projects with early support for the technology,” Arun Ranganatha, chairman of the WebGL working group and standards evangelist at Mozilla, wrote. “Today, the WebGL Working Group at Khronos released a provisional public draft of the WebGL specification, and we are very excited for what this means for the web.”
The WebGL standard is under the supervision of the Khronos Group, a consortium of industry players which is behind the OpenGL graphics interface. The project was announced last summer with the support of four of the five major browsers, with the notable exception of Internet Explorer, obviously. Since then Firefox, Chrome and Safari have all integrated the technology, at least at an experimental level. Mozilla is one of the initiators of the project, so support in Firefox was a given and since the Webkit HTML rendering engine, which also built in support, powers both Chrome and Safari it wasn't much hassle to enable it in those browsers as well.
The draft standard means that the project can now get feedback from developers around the world, and the Working Group is hoping to come up with a final form in the first quarter of 2010. From then, it shouldn't be too long before most modern browsers support it, in line with initial plans to have the technology available to the public by the middle of 2010. Still, it will be a while before it gets widespread mainstream adoption, there are people still using Firefox 2, not to mention IE 6, after all, so a popular online app to use 3D graphics may be a few years off.
3D graphics in browsers may seem cool enough, but not exactly a necessity. After all, 3D graphics just made the jump from games to desktop environments, and even here they serve a mostly aesthetic function rather than add real practicality. But, 3D graphics in browsers will become a necessity in a few years for a very simple reason, web-based operating systems like Chrome OS. Google is determined to shun away from any native app on its new browser, except for Chrome itself obviously, and many people are doubtful that this approach has any chance of succeeding.
They're actually right, at this point a strictly web-only OS is not going to replace traditional operating systems and aren't an alternative to them, at most an addition useful for very specific tasks and devices. But, even if Google now says that Chrome OS is clearly a notebook OS, it would be naive to believe that it doesn't have its sights set on Windows a few years down the line. In order to do that though, 3D graphics in browsers is just one of the things that must become a reality first.