Bindless is pretty much _the_ most important feature we need in WebGPU. Other stuff can be worked around to varying degrees of success, but lack of bindless makes our state changes extremely frequent, which heavily kills performance with how expensive WebGPU makes changing state. The default texture limits without bindless are also way too small for serious applications - just implementing the glTF PBR spec + extensions will blow past them.

I'm really looking forward to getting bindless later down the road, although I expect it to take quite a while.

By the same token, I'm quite surprised that effort is being put into a compatibility mode, when WebGPU is already too old and limiting for a lot of people, and when WebGL(2) is going to have to be maintained by browsers anyways.

Any word on when it'll be supported on Linux without a flag?

Linux support please!

They say:

"This is the next step in the standardization process, and it comes with stronger guarantees of stability and intellectual property protection."

I understand stability, and in the general sense I see that people feel they need to protect their IP, but in this specific case what is meant by "intellectual property protection"?

Honest question: Can someone explain to me why people are excited about WebGPU and WASM and similar technologies?

To me, one of the greatest things about the web is that the DOM is malleable in that you can right click -> view source -> change things. This is dead in an era where the server just sends you a compiled WASM dll.

It seems to me that the inevitable result of things like WASM and WebGPU will be "rich media web 4.0 applications" that are just DRM, crypto miners, and spyware compiled so that they're more difficult to circumvent, and delivered via the browser. An excuse to write web apps with poor performance because "well the user just needs a stronger GPU". It seems like an express train back to the bad old days of every website being written in flash.

I honestly cannot see the upsides of these technologies. Is it gaming? Why would I want to play a 3D game in my fucking browser of all places? That's a strict downgrade in almost every way I can think of. Why would anyone want that? Is it "AI"? Why would I want to run an LLM in the browser, I could just run it natively for better performance?

All I can see and have seen over the last several years is a steady parade of new technologies that will make the internet (and in some cases the lives of every day people) objectively worse while enriching a handful of big tech douchebags.

Why are we going down this path? Who is asking for this stuff? Why the fuck would I want to expose my GPU to a website?