> I don't see how any of the vendors could break it without being extremely overt about it.

> except WebGL, which is abandoned.

So it can be abandoned

It becoming a stale standard is maybe the biggest threat, yes. It has the issue all standards have since several actors have to play along, except this time it isn't Nvidia, Apple, and AMD, but Wgpu/Mozilla and Google. Their incentives are hopefully better aligned with users than those of the hardware vendors.

I suspect WebGL was different, since it was based on the old OpenGL/DX9 way of doing things, so a clean break was desireable. But I honestly am not that knowledgeable in neither graphics programming nor WebGL history, so take that with several grains of salt.

WebGL was based on OpenGL ES 2.0 and a subset of OpenGL ES 3.0.

Google refused to support WebGL compute based on OpenGL ES 3.0 compute shaders, citing WebGPU alternative, and there are still quite a few capabilites from OpenGL ES 3.2 missing from WebGL.

Some of which still not available in WebGPU 1.0.

Pretty impressed with WebGL2, and it is already on most platforms, so I hope it wont be pushed aside by this. I assumed WebGPU was going to be more about a Web based OpenCL implementation, is OpenCL also being pushed aside by this then? and wasnt there a plan to do some compute with WebGL? I cant keep up! I hope this myriad of new Chrome APIs being pushed slows down enough for some new browser vendors to enter the market. Or is this just a push for a new 'native' browser experience single horse race...

Vulkan & GLES are both the obvious competition here, I don't know why you seem to be ignoring them?

Vulkan doesn't run on Apple platforms. And Apple refuses to upgrade their OpenGL drivers. So no, they don't count. Then there are the consoles, which also have their own APIs. Expecting all vendors to implement a common API is a fool's errand, and we should stop trying. The vendors don't want this, and we can't force them. Any common GPU API must be an abstraction over vendor-specific ones.

MoltenVK exists and runs Vulkan on Apple devices perfectly fine. Almost certainly better than WebGPU does even. Vulkan is already a common API both in theory and in practice.

It's not a nice API, but it is common and vendor neutral all the same. A lot moreso than WebGPU is, even, since Khronos has a much more diverse set of inputs than the web does. See eg all the complaints about Chrome dominating the web discussion, and even beyond that you only really need 3 companies on board. Khronos has significantly more at the table than that.