Hi folks, it's been a week, is anyone from the relevant team able to review this and respond?
Best regards Ashley On Wed, 20 Nov 2024 at 16:54, Ashley Gullen <ash...@scirra.com> wrote: > Hi Blink developers, > > I am concerned about this entry on Chrome Platform Status "Remove > SwiftShader fallback", currently scheduled to ship in M133: > https://chromestatus.com/feature/5166674414927872 > > There does not appear to be an associated bug, nor have I seen any intent > to deprecate associated with this on blink-dev. It appears to be an > unannounced unilateral decision by Google which I'm worried has the > potential to have a big impact on products and web content relying on > WebGL, like our commercial browser-based game engine Construct ( > www.construct.net). > > For many years now web developers have been able to assume that WebGL > support is ubiquitous. Numbers are hard to come by, but the best available > are probably from Web3DSurvey (https://web3dsurvey.com/): WebGL 1 is > supported on ~99.7% of devices, but ~2.7% of uses report "major performance > caveat", which seems likely to indicate SwiftShader. At web scale, this is > tens of millions of users. Worse, this survey may in fact be biased towards > high-end users with more modern systems that are more likely to have > hardware/driver support for WebGL - the real number could be larger. WebGPU > still has much lower support numbers so that does not look like a > workaround. Canvas2D is not a viable workaround for modern content, and the > ubiquity of WebGL has meant even tools like Construct that used to support > a Canvas2D fallback ultimately removed it and went all-in on WebGL. > > I suspect for years we have been able to assume that WebGL support is > ubiquitous in large part due to the Swiftshader fallback covering the last > few percent of users who don't have suitable hardware/drivers. Content that > works slowly is better than content that does not work at all, and I fear > that removal of this fallback will result in companies like us, as well as > other major users of WebGL (three.js, itch.io, etc.) being inundated with > "your content stopped working!" complaints. I also find it hard to > understand that "users have a poor experience" with the CPU fallback being > given as a justification for this, as content that does not work at all is > a far worse experience than having it run but slowly, and is far more > likely to result in customers contacting support. > > This could end up being a disaster for us. It would help ease my mind if > Google could: > > - Provide data about the Internet-scale usage of software fallback for > WebGL demonstrating that removal will have minimal impact > - Use some other software fallback like WARP on Windows: > > https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/direct3darticles/directx-warp > - Provide software fallback for WebGPU so there is a possible > workaround with the newer API > - At least delay this decision until there has been time to discuss > with WebGL developers and determine the impact, identify workarounds, > implement them and roll out the changes > > It would also be useful if Google could explain the precise timeline for > this - it's not clear whether M133 is the beginning of a deprecation > period, or the point of removal. > > Best regards > > Ashley Gullen > Scirra Ltd > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "blink-dev" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to blink-dev+unsubscr...@chromium.org. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/d/msgid/blink-dev/CAABs73gJTc1ur8v-aVR3rTsOa%3DeTmDHWEpNuPAyWHQkbUPFt5w%40mail.gmail.com.
