[westwing]

Safari may be fast, especially on mobile, but it sure is holding back everyone on features. The irony is that with WebGL2 and WASM, near-native-speed applications would be possible.

Also, if there were Safari APIs for all their fancy chip features, developers might actually use them widely.

The problem is that if this happened, Apple would lose its monopoly on a good app experience. They need web technology to be crappy, and poor performance is part of that picture.

[nlitened]

You're not talking about developers in general, you're talking about web developers—and holding them back a little is almost a positive thing to do at this point.

[westwing]

Why? There's a lot of stuff getting developed with web technology as the platform of choice. Not because developers want to, but because major stakeholders are pushing for it. It enables cross-device deployment without gatekeeping by platform holders and crusty IT departments. Making the platform worse just makes these applications worse, it won't turn them into pristine native applications.

[wffurr]

WebAssembly support is there, but it needs SIMD and threads to really be fast. That could happen soon, now that there’s some consensus on the standards for both.

WebGL2 support is just about ready in Safari. They are just about fully moved over to using ANGLE as the WebGL backend which includes WebGL2 support. I tested it out with my app on the Safari Technology Preview and it was flawless (as expected from using ANGLE in Chrome).