Good News, IE11 May support WebGL

Just saw this and thought it was worth posting for those of us who consider IE (Windows 8 and Windows Phone) to be a target audience: IE11 Support for WebGL?

Note the article is geared at Windows Phone, but that is due to any changes to Desktop IE11 making there way to the phone version.

That's awesome! Maybe Nintendo and Apple will catch on...

Awesome indeed, and about time imho. Thanks for sharing.

Holy moly, that would be amazing.

Wow! That would be great if they did!

It would be fantastic if IE11 supported WebGL, but I wouldn't take this news to be confirmation in any way. The evidence comes from a leaked version, which MS didn't want to be public. So it may be that MS engineers were simply doing some kind of experiment which they'll later remove, but their experimental version got leaked. Even so, the fact they're at least experimenting with it is interesting.

MS appear to be getting in to a very difficult position with WebGL. Unreal Engine 4 supports WebGL, which was announced recently; some popular games like RuneScape have announced they'll support WebGL; we've always supported it and have pointed out its rendering and performance benefits. So if they continue to refuse to support it, more and more people will switch to other browsers for gaming. But supporting it would probably seriously hurt Microsoft's own DirectX, which they have a big interest in pushing. It would also be embarrassing for them to U-turn over their previous "it's insecure" nonsense they tried to use an excuse previously.

Whatever happens, it will be very interesting to see what they do about this.

Ashley, they seem to be doing a lot of u-turns lately, in the latest IE10 update they reversed their decision on Flash and instead of having a white list of allowed sites and blocking all the rest, they now allow all sites accept ones that have been reported as causing issues. So U-turns seem to be the order of the day... again, fingers are crossed... hope for the best expect the worst, etc...

According to this post which has been updated: http://fremycompany.com/BG/2013/Internet-Explorer-11-rsquo-s-leaked-build-395/ - they've now figured out how to enable WebGL, and verified that it actually works in IE11! I think this is a strong sign WebGL could actually really ship in IE11, let's hope they don't change their mind and back out of it...

But what is the chance IE11 is only available for Windows 8 onwards or something. I mean XP and Vista users already are limited to versions 8 and 9 and Windows 7 only just recently got IE10.

Interesting. If Internet Explorer 11 supported WebGL and OGG, that would be nice. <img src="smileys/smiley1.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

microsoft-news.com/webgl-spdy3-new-dev-tools-more-confirmed-for-ie11-in-win-8-1

Since it looks like ie11 shipping in 8.1 will have webgl what does this mean for the win8 and html export options for C2?

I have some hopes but if someone from Scirra could actually comment on this it would be appreciated =)

It's pretty much 100% confirmed now. Providing MS implement it in a standards-compliant way, all existing Windows 8 apps should automatically switch to using the faster WebGL renderer, and allow use of shaders. I hear it's also coming to Windows Phone 8, although later in the year. So it's good news for anyone publishing to Windows 8 or Windows Phone 8.

For the web, this means WebGL is much more widely supported. IE still has a pretty big chunk of users on Windows, and if they all end up on IE11 then that's a lot more people who get the faster, shader-enabled WebGL renderer. So good news for web publishing too!

Any information on IE11 exclusivity to Windows 8.1? Is that just spectulation?

I would expect them to support Windows 7 as well, but probably not Vista, since typically they support both the current and previous version of Windows with new IE versions. However the Windows 7 release might come later, since IE10 came out for Windows 8 a few months before it came out for Windows 7.

Can anyone get the Windows 8.1 update to install? Been trying to no avail for ages now.