Hello there my friends. My name is Marco Gomez and as per my passion regarding CGI (and also for full-stack development), I wrote my own GLSL editor for the browser. It is called ShaderLab, and if you want to check it out you can find it here: https://shaderlab.mgz.me . Even though I wrote it, I can consider myself a beginner regarding GLSL and WebGL, so I'd like to count with your opinions regarding the WebGL version I'm using, as I have to make some decisions before I get more users publishing their work on the platform. But first, a brief disclaimer regarding my app features:
Yes, there are a lot of similarities with any other online WebGL Fragment Shader editor around, like ShaderToy or the editor from The Book of Shaders, but I wanted to implement myself some unique features for my personal usage that I couldn't find in none of them, like, for example, loading an MP3 file for real-time FFT analysis to be used as input audio uniforms to create audio-reactive shaders, or accepting external images from any website (like imgur for example, or any other website that also allows cross-domain access), or VIM mode (for now toggle-able pressing F9 with the editor on focus, I'll create a toggle button on the navbar over the next weeks) to use search and replace regexps for example. Those are some of the reasons that made me decide to write my own editor.
It is a super recent project (I wrote the first lines of code about 2-3 months ago) and I made it all by myself, thus, there's still A LOT to do to even consider it on alpha stage. But it's already online and working.
Since I started writing it, my plan was to make it use WebGL 2.0 / ES 3.0 and I wrote it accordingly. However, after making the website publicly available, I received lots of complains from Safari and Edge users, as those browsers does not support WebGL 2.0 like Chrome and Firefox. I don't know if this compatibility table is up to date ( https://caniuse.com/#feat=webgl2 ) but it is a very scary one if you don't want to exclude lots of users from viewing or making use of your project, thus, I decided to make all the example shaders that I published on the platform ES 1.0 compatible.
Sticking with ES 1.0 to write shaders is kind of a severe compromise, as there's LOTS of WebGL 2.0 features that I'd like to use, like vertex array objects always (not optionally) available, 3D textures and a ton of texture formats available, non-PoT textures with mips, non-constant-restricted loops, integer arithmetic, multiple draw buffers, out layout, etc.
That said, right now I'm trying to decide between sticking with WebGL 1.0 and make it compatible with any reasonably modern browser, or jump straight to focus on WebGL 2.0 (of course, allowing compatibility with ES 100), but making it unavailable for Safari and Edge users. One of the solutions that I considered involves some user code manipulation, and storing the version of the shader on my database, in a sense that if some user access the website with a non-ES 3.0 compatible browser, my shader pagination method (on the home gallery and on the user gallery) would only return ES 1.0 shaders, and for a user with a WebGL 2.0 fully compatible browser, the pagination would return all shaders.
I honestly don't know if I should expect that browsers like Safari or Edge will have a decent implementation of WebGL 2.0 in a near future.
I'd really like to hear opinions from the community regarding my concern with the WebGL version, and also, to have some feedback and suggestions regarding my platform (any type of feedback and suggestions will be highly appreciated and taken in consideration for future features). Stressing the most important question here: should I worry about making this platform available for users with non-webgl2.0 compatible browsers? (I'd also like to mention performance problems on Linux versions of Firefox ( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1010527 ) but maybe it would be more appropriate to leave it for a more specific thread regarding that conversation, but definitely, it is also a conversation that I'd like to start).
Thanks a lot for your time being a part of this topic. I appreciate it.
Best regards.
