[akersten]

Thanks for the background! Pretty cool have the author here and I hope you didn't take my venting too personally ;)

As a firefox user I appreciate that we were considered. Although maybe I've got a new bone to pick with Mozilla now, since not exposing hardware/software rendering mode or readback y/n is a weird hill to die on when things like canvas font rendering fingerprinting are much more reliable and precise (if their refusal was on privacy grounds).

With the history in mind, an ideal flag to me would have been more like an enum of "minimumRequiredGLExperience" valued like ["any", <benchmark value>, "parity"] where apps have a middle ground to say "even if we have SW rendering, maybe we'll still want GL if the browser ranks itself above the threshold value (which would be computed ahead of time and have a standard-ish definition, kind of like the scores on userbenchmark). While still somewhat nebulous, it would allow fine-tuning the experience for known target platforms.

I definitely understand the limited window of opportunity though, and rolling an entire feature like that above would be a big project so I can't fault anyone for going with the compromise. I just wish the name had been different or the documentation more clear - even the Khronos docs are wishy washy on whether SW rendering will for sure cause a failure, or if there's some implementation defined benchmark already that it boils down to. Which I realize is also something that would require work from the Mozilla side too, that they may not be willing to document for the same logic as not wanting to expose whether readback is happening in the first place!

Anyway, thanks again for responding, and I apologise for being a little abrasive in my first post.