[rsp1984]

It's a bit of a shame that WebGL settled for the lowest common denominator (i.e. OpenGL ES 2.0 capabilities).

This was probably to enable WebGL on mobile devices that would have otherwise been locked out, but it heavily restricted things on the desktop which for the most part would have OpenGL 4 capable GPUs these days.

However given that WebGL on mobile still mostly sucks anyway, not sure if going for the lowest common denominator was the right decision.

[zurn]

WebGL 1.0 is almost 4 years old. OpenGL ES 2.0 was then latest and greatest.

And WebGL 1 has taken this long to reach mostly-working in implementations, it would have probably died in the crib if it had targeted the nascent GLES 3 feature set.

Running GLES shaders safely and reasonably fast in a sandbox (on top of insecure & crash prone drivers) is high wizadry.

[rsp1984]

> WebGL 1.0 is almost 4 years old. OpenGL ES 2.0 was then latest and greatest.

Latest and greatest for mobile yes but the desktop world was already on OpenGL 4 at that point.

My whole point was that they could have just ignored mobile and delivered a much more powerful WebGL based on OpenGL 4 instead.