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.
Re:Chrome Ships WebGPU
by whitehexagon on Friday April 07, 2023 @09:29AM
(#35481375)
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...
> except WebGL, which is abandoned.
So it can be abandoned