The Story
The developers behind Webkit have started including their 3D engine into the nightly builds of the product. It’s called WebGL, and no, it’s not a plugin. It works with the new HTML5 standard, along with some JavaScript and OpenGL 2.0 Now the cool thing about this is that Google, Mozilla, and Opera are all working on WebGL, so we don’t have a divided house all working on separate “standards” (when everyone and his mom has his own standard, it’s hard to come across that word without laughing).
As some of you may remember, Google is developing their own O3D rendering engine as part of the Chromium project. But this shouldn’t amount to a completely separate product. O3D and WebGL share a lot in their development philosophies, such as the belief that 3D in the browser is going to require some hardware acceleration (hence the OpenGL). Presumably, both projects are going with hardware power because neither believes JavaScript alone to be fast enough yet.
How This Makes Things Different
But this of course is a reversal of the whole browser-based, low powered computing revolution that we’ve seen. One of the reasons netbook and whatnot have caught on is because people don’t really need video cards and Arnold Schwarzenegger processors for most of what they want to do with computers. If you realize this, you’ll know that this whole 3D in the browser development is an industry-changing thing.
I know someone reading this must be saying “But Michael, surely 3D in the browser will be fine on integrated graphics and won’t require users to have dedicated graphics cards with fans the size of houses.” Well, that depends on what you want to do. One of the potentials of WebGL and the like is to move things that have been for years run via their own local processes (3D games, image modeling software, etc) into the browser. If the software you’re trying to use is lightweight enough, then that Intel GMA 950 in your netbook will be fine. If, however, you want to play Halo 63, then you’ll still need to upgrade your graphics card, same as it ever was.
