7 ms·
IE11 to support WebGL
- Zikes 13y agoAnd IE11 will support Windows 7, right?
- warfangle 13y agoThey haven't said one way or the other at this point -- and have stated that they won't any time soon.
- adrr 13y agoThey need to support these newer browsers on older operating systems. If the OS is still being actively patched, new browsers should be made backwards compatible to work on it otherwise we'll have exact same problem with IE8 on XP and IE9 on Vista. And soon to be IE10 on Windows 7.
- dstorey 13y agoYes. IE11 will be on Windows 7: http://www.engadget.com/2013/06/26/microsoft-internet-explorer-11/ http://www.engadget.com/2013/06/26/microsoft-internet-explor...
- roschdal 13y agoThis is great news for game development of the web. WebGL will become the standard for 3D browser games.
- judah 13y agoCredit to Microsoft for reversing their previous stance on WebGL. Credit to Mozilla for pushing 3d on the web and forcing the issue. Any browser that doesn't implement WebGL will soon be considered crippled; Microsoft desperately wants to avoid that title again, so in a way, Mozilla forced their hand. Competition at work.
- dman 13y agoI am surprised they didnt try to push a webdx based off directx.
- gsnedders 13y agoMS have done little to push the IE team around in recent years, thankfully.
- dman 13y agoSounds great - theres so much talent locked away at Microsoft if only business models werent getting in the way.
- rurounijones 13y agoThey did, sort of[1], it didn't appear to fly. [1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-fx/2012JulSep/0074.html http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-fx/2012JulSep/007...
- snprbob86 13y agoI dunno... Allowing the language to be selected like a video codec or image file format seems like a reasonable request. There are three issues: 1) Language pluggable? 2) Spec-ed shader languages 3) Mandatory languages The proposal was: 1) No 2 & 3) GL SL ES Microsoft proposed: 1) Yes 2) GL SL ES 3) None The perfectly reasonable compromise would have been: 1) Yes 2 & 3) GL SL ES
- 13y ago
- aoberoi 13y agonow, where do they stand on WebRTC?
- MatthewPhillips 13y agoThey waited until WebRTC was about to be ratified and then released their own incompatible spec.
- drivebyacct2 13y ago/me nods http://html5labs.interoperabilitybridges.com/cu-rtc-web/cu-rtc-web.htm http://html5labs.interoperabilitybridges.com/cu-rtc-web/cu-r...
- wmf 13y agoAnd yet they're supporting SPDY instead of their own S+M proposal.
- ZeroGravitas 13y agoThey do that for everything. Ponderous silence then last minute derailing BS. Independent of the pros and cons of any particular single technology they should be called out for what a poor corporate citizen this makes them, and how it is anti-standards and anti-consumer.
- sdoowpilihp 13y agoThis is potentially great news for anyone using a browser. Let's hope that the implementation is close to spec, and makes for a relatively seamless experience across all browsers.
- chez17 13y ago> Let's hope that the implementation is close to spec I got so excited for a moment and then you had to go and post this. Microsoft seems to have a desire to make things difficult for web developers.
- sudont 13y agoConsidering they way it went down [1], Microsoft felt (and may still feel) that the web is an enterprise market. In so, that it was selling developer tools to web shops because the code goes through Microsoft servers to Microsoft clients. IE, a vertical integration to simplify HR decisions. [2] That ideology carries through to the spec—enterprise products often contain janky features that mean little to developers, but the world to the bosses buying them. Thankfully Android and iOS are a driving force showing that the web is more a consumer broadcast space than one built simply for the spec that best matches someone's tech opinions. 1. http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120507/12295718818/ http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120507/12295718818/ 2. Paraphrasing, but I've personally turned down jobs that were in this vein, specifically writing IE HTML in Visual Studio, because if their browser share is 80% IE, they might as well use the IDE from the company that makes the browser.
- bliker 13y agoIs it common practice to force particular IDE to developers? Especially for web developers. I imagine my productivity would decrease quite dramatically for some time.
- plorkyeran 13y agoOnly the most insane of companies explicitly require the use of a specific editor, but it's easy for the choices of technology to implicitly limit developers to a single IDE. If your project's build system assumes that everyone is using Visual Studio (or Eclipse, or whatever), then using something else is going to either require a lot of switching between them or a lot of extra work on your part.
- signed0 13y agoThe other big takeway is that they added support for SPDY3!
- drivebyacct2 13y agoWow. IE11 looks like it has some really great stuff in it, particularly the dev tools, even over the WebGL. Props to the IE team!
- hartror 13y agoThis is huge!
- mzarate06 13y agoLove the improved dev tools and WebGL decision, but I also hate how long it's taken MS to reach this point. Would also love for IE 11 to be available on Windows 7.
- winslow 13y agoHave they said it won't be on Windows 7? I would expect them to release it on Win7 to try and keep their market share. I hope they do as I am building a WebGL application for work :)
- mzarate06 13y agoThey haven't confirmed either way, which is why I'm still hoping it'll land in Win7: http://www.ubergizmo.com/2013/06/internet-explorer-11-ie11-might-make-it-to-windows-7/ http://www.ubergizmo.com/2013/06/internet-explorer-11-ie11-m... "We aren't sharing anything around which versions of Windows IE11 will be available on at this time."
- Already__Taken 13y agoSo far it's at least safe to assume MS support current and previous releases. As this is a feature pack to w8 and not w9 I should be ok so assume ie11 will see w7. But who knows, MS seem to think ie is some carrot to lure people to them. It could as such be crippled to w8.
- orf 13y agoI love the look of the new development tools, lightyears ahead of IE10. Lets see how it matches up to Chrome
- lucb1e 13y agoIs it just me, or are that others that think "Didn't it support that yet?!" at every IE release? I don't use Windows so I never use IE anymore, but I'd think IE9 or 10 would support WebGL by now...
- bskap 13y agoIE 9 was released only 11 days after WebGL was standardized.
- coldtea 13y agoSo? It didn't prevent other browsers for having a mostly working implementation that they could improve upon with time.
- bskap 13y agoAnd they supported those mostly working implementations for about 6 weeks. Microsoft supports their releases for years.
- drivebyacct2 13y agoIs that even true now that IE11 keeps itself auto-updated to the latest major version?
- chc 13y agoWebGL was bleeding-edge when IE 9 was released, and there were still very valid concerns about its security for a while after that. Opera implemented it, but disabled it due to these concerns. After their nightmarish history with security, Microsoft are very focused on hardening Windows — so I wouldn't exactly call it regressive to leave WebGL out of IE 10, which was probably feature-frozen in early 2012.
- nivla 13y agoLove the new changes in IE and the direction it is taking. >IE11 allow you to turn off the SmartScreen filter right in the download UI. Now only if chrome would do that I can keep myself from switching away from it. Its frustrating to know that everytime I download a file or save an image, the file hash, IP and the download URL is sent to Google. The whole NSA thing isn't making it better either. [1][2] [1] http://superuser.com/questions/387724/how-to-disable-download-scanning-protection-of-new-chrome-17 http://superuser.com/questions/387724/how-to-disable-downloa... [2] http://blog.chromium.org/2012/01/all-about-safe-browsing.html http://blog.chromium.org/2012/01/all-about-safe-browsing.htm...
- JoshTriplett 13y agoYou can turn off the "Safe Browsing" features in Chromium; your link [2] explicitly says how to do so.
- nivla 13y agoI know but that also turns off the malware links protection. I don't mind the malware site/link protection since it only sends in a small part of the URL's hash for matching (similar to how we have in Firefox). Comparatively, the file scanner requires the whole hash of the file, the clear text of the download URL and the IP address which I find far more intrusive to privacy. I am hoping for a future update where they would let us enable/disable them individually.
- drivebyacct2 13y agoUsually I groan when people complain about the Malware features in Chrome in relation to privacy but this is definitely one I'd not heard of. The hash of the whole file is bad enough, but even if it were unique, the full URL could easily contain sensitive information or information about the file contents.
- tmzt 13y agowhy wouldn't it be a hash of the download URL only?
- bliker 13y agothe dev tools look promising. But I do not understand what are they are trying to achieve by this. I do not see myself, or many people, switching to IE for development when there are no extensions available. I at least want some REST client like Postman. Now It appears they are only catching up on Chrome and Firebug, that will hardly convince anybody. Do not get me wrong, they are doing good work making IE modern browser, But they can't do it alone, especially with such long release cycle. Maybe making dev branch like Canary or Aurora?
- shadowfox 13y ago> But I do not understand what are they are trying to achieve by this. I do not see myself, or many people, switching to IE for development Perhaps there are others who have to support IE as a target and would like to debug/verify front ends in-browser?
- bhauer 13y agoThank goodness that "Text - Empty Text Node" has been removed from the DOM explorer! The new developer tools, especially that UI responsiveness report [1] are hot looking. Looking forward to giving that a spin. [1] http://microsoft-news.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/UI-Responsiveness-Report.png http://microsoft-news.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/UI-Resp...
- coldtea 13y ago>IE11 to support WebGL Always 2 years at least late to the party, so that using the latest technologies across all browsers remains constantly (also considering adoption) 3-4 years in the future.
- nick2021 13y agoI completely agree. The IE team/management team are a bunch of fools and it pisses me off that they are able to get away with this. I can't wait for chrome or firefox to bury them completely.
- nick2021 13y agoI don't really care what great features IE comes out with in any version. I just want to stop having to make tweaks to my sites that render the same on chrome, firefox and safari for IE.
- cromwellian 13y agoIf you build it, they will eventually be dragged, kicking and screaming to it.
- marcosscriven 13y agoNow we just need Apple to make it available in Safari, without having to explicitly turn it on. Oh, and enable it in iOS Safari too - which I rather suspect they wnt any time soon unfortunately.
- herge 13y agoThis is great news1 I'll be able to use WebGL with the majority of my users who use IE in what, 5-6 years?
- showwebgl 13y agoAwesome news! And the Xbox One is already available in 3D display with WebGL! https://sketchfab.com/show/qsRPEw7hTKC4E02XMop9DUpu2wb https://sketchfab.com/show/qsRPEw7hTKC4E02XMop9DUpu2wb
- T_T 13y agobetter late than never i guess.
- idupree 13y agoWhat engineering did they do to reduce the security risk? As much as I like WebGL as a dev, Microsoft's arguments against feeding arbitrary machine code to buggy graphics cards that have kernel-level memory access privileges... seemed a bit convincing.
- azakai 13y agoI don't know anything about what Microsoft has done in particular. But I can tell you what other WebGL implementations do, for example: rewrite shaders to ensure their memory accesses are safe, not accept as valid shaders code that is dangerous (but would be valid GLSL in general), validate input to the graphics card (e.g., buffers are bound, avoids depending on the GL driver to check that), do fuzz testing, maintain blacklists of known buggy drivers, etc. etc. I would guess Microsoft is doing much the same, but it does have the extra advantage of only caring about one OS and also owning that OS.
- seanmcdirmid 13y agoYou know, the drivers could have just gotten better over time. Remember when Vista came out, they moved to a new driver model, and there were lots of bugs...people were worried about untrusted shader code bringing down machines (not quite security vulnerability, but definitely a DOS!). These days, the driver model is more mature, drivers that consumers have are a bit more robust, they probably re-evaluated their worries, which I think is great! Dynamism and flexibility is good in big.corp. Disclaimer: Microsoft employee, but speaking for myself.
- pvnick 13y agoJust want to reply to say I also would like to hear an answer to this question. Something I've wanted to do for a while is write a fuzzer [1] that puts together arbitrary garbage shader script code and runs it with weird webgl operations looking for exploitable crashes. I would expect there to be a ton of bugs found, but then again the monetary barrier to entry might be high considering differences between hardware. It also looks like the good folks at Mozilla have already been doing this to some degree [2], presumably shrinking the untested threat surface considerably (man I love those guys). [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzz_testing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzz_testing [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=665936 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=665936
- quackerhacker 13y agoI really hope IE11 will integrate WebRTC. I have to give credit to IE10 though...a cool feature that I have only seen in safari (through quicktime), is IE10 allows multi audio track support for html5 mp4...great for multi-language videos, and adapting a single video to play on multiple devices (like some that don't support 5.1 audio).
- tmzt 13y agoIt would be extremely useful for getting Skype in Outlook.com.
- cscx 13y agoSeriously who's using IE nowadays? http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2013/06/25/ssl-intercepted-today-decrypted-tomorrow.html http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2013/06/25/ssl-intercepted...
- opinali 13y agoShaming link 1: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/06/microsoft-no-way-to-support-webgl-and-meet-our-security-needs/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/06/micros... Shaming link 2: http://www.extremetech.com/computing/87696-webgl-is-fundamentally-flawed http://www.extremetech.com/computing/87696-webgl-is-fundamen...
- drivebyacct2 13y agoWhat are we supposed to take away from those links? The latter isn't even written from the perspective of Microsoft, it's just another generic {Open/Web}GL rant (if anything, you've granted MS legitimacy here by acknowledging other legitimate complaints about the spec). Yes, I was annoyed when they boldly claimed they wouldn't be supporting it at all. I'm also gracious enough to say "Thanks" when handed a gift. The IE team is clearly making an effort.
- opinali 13y agoMy takeaway is simple, just exposing the BS from Microsoft's original stance wrt OpenGL. One thing is saying "WebGL is right now hard to secure because current OpenGL drivers are buggy, or IE's sandboxing tech is not good enough, whatever". A different thing is, "WebGL is fundamentally flawed, will never work, IE will not and should not support it ever". Of course the same people are already changing the discourse and claiming that _now_ WebGL is safe, and IE11's WebGL will have the upper hand in security because MS controls the whole stack, etc. This doesn't mean I don't appreciate the change, I'm really happy that IE11 is apparently going to be an awesome improvement (over IE10 which is already pretty good, even if dated).
- DigitalSea 13y agoI, for one, welcome our new WebGL overlords. Seriously though, it's good to see Microsoft reversed their stance on WebGL no doubt their hand was forced by Mozilla and Webkit (probably Mozilla more so). And SPDY support as well? Looks like IE11 might actually be a decent contender in the browser race. The future of web development doesn't look so bad after all.
- sampk 13y agoTypical stubborn child.
- moneyrich 13y agoThe other day an application I run launched IE, I was pretty confused as to why IE opened in the first place, and as it was loading I began to swear, a lot... I started to spam ALT and F4 while clicking on the red X icon in the top-right corner. It took about 5 seconds, to load IE onto and then off the heap, but finally it went away. I haven't used it since that fucking day.
- Aqueous 13y agoIt's going to "support" WebGL.
- fhd2 13y agoNow that's good news. I feel this whole "but IE won't ever support it!" argument was seriously holding WebGL back. IE still has very significant market share, and since they arguably got their act together lately, I doubt it's going to get smaller in the short term. Considering that existing C++/OpenGL code bases can be ported to the web relatively easy with Emscripten, my bet is that we'll see a bunch of games come to the browser over the next ~3 years.
- mtgx 13y agoIE has a lot of market share with IE7, IE8 and possibly IE9. They don't have a lot of marketshare with IE11 - and possibly never will. So the argument that "WebGL is not supported by IE so I'll never use it" was pretty bogus anyway, since the people using those versions of IE were probably never in your target market anyway.
- fhd2 13y agoYou're right. Last time I checked, IE8 was still the most popular IE version. However, since IE9, it's being updated automatically, so I have some hopes that most IE users will end up using the latest version, just as with Chrome and Firefox. The main reason for IE8's popularity is probably that it's the last IE version available on Windows XP, which is still popular. I really hope Microsoft gives up on the idea that new browser versions can only come with new OS versions. But still, even if only 10% of all IE users use IE11, that percentage can only grow. Previously, IE was a dead end for WebGL. Now there's a perspective, and that's probably good enough.
- mtgx 13y agoWill Microsoft support the full OpenGL on Windows, too, now? Or will they just run WebGL through Google's ANGLE project? At least Google had the "excuse" to use it because they couldn't put OpenGL on Windows themselves, so they had to translate DirectX to OpenGL to make WebGL work. What's Microsoft's excuse? They should support OpenGL and allow Google and Mozilla to use the OpenGL API's directly, too. Then we'll all get faster, and possibly richer WebGL.
- CJefferson 13y agoOpenGL on Windows is a driver issue. Some hardware manufacturers make opengl drivers, of varying quality. I'm not clear what you want Microsoft to do?
- freehunter 13y agoMicrosoft should control Windows like Apple controls OSX except when I don't want them to! If something is wrong with Windows, it's Microsoft's fault for not controlling third party vendors! When Microsoft controls third party vendors, they're being anti-competitive!
- ger_phpmagazin 13y agoDoes this imply that those features will be henceforth natively available to windows 8.1?
- anotherbadlogin 13y agoBut will it support PRINTING Web pages? IE 10 doesn't. Microsoft expects every printer manufacturer to write some kind of custom shim for every printer, just for Internet Explorer. Totally defeating decades of software evolution, in which the OS handles tasks like printing and file management, so those don't have to be rewritten by every developer thousands of times.
- lepunk 13y agomy long term dream is to see microsoft finally giving up on using their own rendering engine and move to either mozilla or webkit. both of them are following the standards pretty neatly so it would make dev's life far easier. with each major release IE promises being better. which is true for an extent but they also introduce new bugs so our css / html has different hacks for each version
- isarat 13y agoHe's a fat boy. Walks really slow :) I expected WebDirectX!