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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

If you'd asked me three years ago, I never would have guessed it would turn out like this. We have Internet Explorer supporting WebGL on ARM-based Windows tablets manufactured by Microsoft itself, yet the iPad still lacks WebGL. It's like bizarro world.

One gets the impression that Apple feels WebGL is perhaps too much power in a cross-platform package. If you need to do 3D-accelerated GUIs or games on iOS today, you build an Objective-C app for the App Store because there's no other way to access those APIs. Is Apple protecting their lock-in?

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The bigger thing is the payments infrastructure. There's no easy way to monetize a WebGL game.

Not true. You could have an online WebGL game that requires an account and dynamic server provided data to run. The account would cost money.

EDIT: Added last sentence.

To elaborate: there's no easy way for Apple to monetize a WebGL game.

Compared to using Store Kit, this is super complicated to build and manage.

The App Store also provides marketing, which is huge. Where is the public listing of WebGL games that you can quickly browse and start playing?

If WebGL worked in UIKit's WebView, you could just wrap your WebGL game with PhoneGap and use StoreKit for ripping off children... I mean, selling exciting in-app upgrades.

I'm not convinced the App Store is a meaningful marketing channel anyway, except for the 0.001% of game developers that can afford to buy downloads and then happen to get lucky in the App Store curation roulette.

> Where is the public listing of WebGL games that you can quickly browse and start playing?

https://chrome.google.com/webstore

Without knowing the details, I assume that WebGL poses a high security risk.

Considering that Mobile Safari has access to lots of confidential data (eg. iCloud keychain), and runs in a less restricted sandbox (can make data pages executable), that's probably the last place where Apple wants to try out some new technology.

EDIT: It's weird how iOS is now arguably the most secure mobile platform, after all the shit they got from Blackberry in the beginning :)

WebGL /does/ pose a high security risk.

Security problems were pointed out to the WebGL guys a very long time ago and continue to be pointed out - they have not all been addressed (for whatever reasons - i don't want to imply that any of them are impossible to resolve) although extensions exist or have been proposed to resolve the more serious concerns.

This is quite well documented: http://www.khronos.org/webgl/security/

I'd be more inclined to think that Apple don't want to include WebGL for other reasons though. Their track record with technology is much less than encouraging...

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