[vardump]

Same was said about sound, Javascript, web video, and pretty much any addition on top of basic markup.

I think future web will be better and/or can consume less power when sites have more direct control of rendering.

Emphasis on power usage -- I think they (= browser vendors) should give a lot of consideration how to enable developers to save power. Web rendering is already mainly done on GPUs anyways, but there's opportunity to push less pixels to achieve the same results as the current rendering methods. Pushing less pixels equals less power. Of course passive power savings (from developers' point of view) are also good.

WebGL must also not perceptibly increase page load times, a few milliseconds is acceptable.

If the features turn out to be useful, when reliable WebGL is ubiquitous, various javascript libraries will start to use it and number of sites using WebGL will increase rapidly.

[Animats]

WebGL must also not perceptibly increase page load times, a few milliseconds is acceptable.

Almost every non-trivial WebGL page I've seen shows a "Loading" message for some period of time.

[vardump]

Well, I meant just fixed base cost in milliseconds. In other words, how long it takes to just output something extremely simple, say, a flat shaded triangle without external libraries. Not to measure resource loading and other initialization.

Of course initialization and possible shader language, SPIR or whatever compilation will take time on top of that.

Many current WebGL apps require a lot of large data, textures, meshes and libraries. Obviously loading those will take time.

[Animats]

Flash had an scheduled loading scheme, so the timeline specified when an asset would be sent as you played a Flash animation. Macromedia had authoring tools which would try to slot the assets in the timeline so they'd be available when needed, while staying under a bandwidth limit.

You could, in theory, do that with WebGL. Google is all fired up about "preloading" lately. This is an authoring tool problem, and if WebGL games get serious, there will probably be author-side tools for this.

[cousin_it]

One look at today's web should tell you how much developers get paid for conserving power, as opposed to adding bling.

[pjmlp]

Which is why I only do web dev when I get paid to do it, for me programming for fun means native applications.