Remove WebGL1 support?

[wizgrav]

I thought it was a nice issue to raise. WebGL2 as minimum would make a lot of things better in the library, for instance with the bone textures the glsl code becomes way nicer and requires one less uniform, because we can read texture sizes directly in the shader. I suspect this may apply elsewhere as well and for sure a lot of branches in the renderer will be eliminated. Is there still userbase out there that doesn't support WebGL2? It's like almost a decade old mobile technology

[mrdoob]

I would love to get rid of all the WebGL1 code but I feel it would be premature.

What I was thinking was that we could remove the automatic WebGL1 fallback and add a enableWebGL1Fallback parameter to WebGLRenderer's constructor. That way we'll hear all the cases while still being able to have a solution.

And at that point we'd be able to have a better feeling of when to remove all the WebGL1 code path.

[Mugen87]

I vote to stall this topic. There are still a lot of devices outside there which only support WebGL 1. I'm afraid even with enableWebGL1Fallback there will be a lot of support effort. I would reconsider this after least one or two years. Especially iOS devices need more time to establish WebGL 2.

[wizgrav]

@Mugen87 I understand your concerns but for old safaris according to caniuse webgl2 can be enabled from settings. And what kind of content can we show anyway to devices that are so old they cannot upgrade anymore? https://caniuse.com/?search=webgl2

[wizgrav]

@Mugen87 hmmm after seeing the procedure I start to reconsider this is like the death of ux https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44jaS1eloy8&t=69s

[donmccurdy]

Note that having the latest Safari or Chrome does not necessarily backport WebGL 2 support to older devices – you need both an updated browser AND a compatible device. I think it's very likely (but not sure how to test this...) that low-cost Android devices being manufactured today and running the latest version of Chrome may still not support WebGL 2.0. Unfortunately the statistics on https://caniuse.com/?search=webgl2 are meaningless in this case, they just indicate that the browser version is common, not that device support is common.

[gkjohnson]

Where's webglstats.com when you need it 😭 It was such a loss when that went away.

according to caniuse webgl2 can be enabled from setting

That flag has been around for a long time and from I can recall the "experimental support" in older safari versions was broken in a variety of ways such that it wouldn't really reliable as a fallback.

Having said that I'll be sad for the sake of the project if it takes multiple years to remove WebGL2. WebGL2 has been around in most major browsers for at least 3-4 years, now. And OpenGL ES 3.0 has been around since 2008. Are we sure there would be modern android devices that wouldn't support it? I would have expected outdated apple devices to be the long tail for something like this.

[wizgrav]

@donmccurdy yeah that's valid, though I suspect that there are not many of these devices in circulation. Having it disabled in a sizable chunk of ios devices is the big problem here. Asking the user to enable it takes 5 or more taps and scrolls so not viable. The browser vendors could gather the stats so we know where we stand

[donmccurdy]

though I suspect that there are not many of these devices in circulation

It's great that iOS finally supports WebGL2 — that makes using WebGL2 a "real thing" now from my perspective. But in terms of being able to drop WebGL 1 support, it's really Android I'm concerned about.. My untested hunch (RIP webglstats.com 😫) is that there's still a majority of Android devices lacking WebGL2 if we consider smartphone users globally. Definitely stats would be really helpful here though.

[vanruesc]

Definitely stats would be really helpful here though.

I think the next best official stats would be the Android dashboard which states that 8.5% of all devices only support OpenGL ES 2.0 as of July 31, 2021. This at least implies no support for OpenGL 3.0+ / WebGL 2.

[mrdoob]

@vanruesc Interesting...

For iOS land we can probably use this page.
The numbers are from June 2021 though.

[jeremy-coleman]

I am probably in the top 0.1 % of household income globally and my phone (iphone 6) doesnt support webgl2. Dont be ridiculous.

[donmccurdy]

@jeremy-coleman out of curiosity – my iPhone SE (2016) supposedly has the same internal specs as an iPhone 6s, but does indeed support WebGL 2 (after this year's iOS / Safari updates) without a flag. Is that not the case on the latest iOS for you? I guess that would tell us the exact year and model where WebGL 2 support ends, if not.

[jeremy-coleman]