jsheard 10 months ago

Despite all the bending over backwards to keep the fruit company on board with WebGPU, they still haven't actually shipped their Metal backend in Safari over a year after Chrome managed to ship DirectX, Metal and Vulkan backends simultaneously. Mozilla hasn't shipped WebGPU either but their resources can hardly be compared to Apples.

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torginus 10 months ago

Honestly Google's probably almost as guilty - Native Client was a great idea and sidestepped basically all the issues we are having now, but they killed it in favour of 'standard' APIs, like Wasm that basically barely work for their intended purposes

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  • flohofwoe 10 months ago

    Nah, Native Client had a lot of its own problems. Except for pthreads-style multithreading, PNaCl couldn't even compete with asm.js, and Spectre/Meltdown would be just as catastrophic for PNaCl as it was for SharedArrayBuffer.

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  • pjmlp 10 months ago

    Add Mozzilla to the mix, for not wanting to adopt PNaCL, coming up with asm.js, and for what.

    Firefox is almost irrelevant now, and Google is calling all the shots anyway.

    Without Safari's relevance on mobile, the Web would have long turned into ChromeOS everywhere by now.

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    • Ygg2 10 months ago

      > Add Mozzilla to the mix, for not wanting to adopt PNaCl.

      Mozilla wasn't in any position to command the market, even at the time PNaCl was created. PNaCl failed on its own demerits.

      > Firefox is almost irrelevant now

      Firefox has been irrelevant because it doesn't have the trillion dollar budget of Apple and Google, nor the vendor lock-in, and with that no reach which would enable it to steer web the way it deems fit. It has nothing to do with asm.js

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  • Ygg2 10 months ago

    > Honestly Google's probably almost as guilty - Native Client was a great idea and sidestepped basically all the issues

    NaCl failed on its own.

    A) Wasn't backwards compatible

    B) Spec was - look at the Chrome source

    C) No one other than Google wanted it

    D) It was essentially ActiveX Google (yeah, ActiveX had some nifty ideas and they still persist to this day)

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