Web technologies lag behind desktop technologies for good reasons.
WebGL 2 is based on OpenGL ES 3, which brings it to rough feature parity with a fairly common baseline for GPU APIs that dates back to 2007-2008-ish, the OpenGL 3 / DirectX 10 feature set. This is a pretty good feature set.
The way I see it, browsers are already API-bloated. I just don’t see the justification for further developing a graphics API when another one based on more modern standards is already underway. It’s not like it’s a small effort.
If it took 10 years to achieve widespread webgl 2 support it could take another 10 for webgpu. People want to make web applications today, not plan them for the future.
WebGL 2 was fully developed five years ago. What happened now was Safari finally exposed support, and reused a lot of implementation effort done by Google in the form of ANGLE (which Safari was already using, just not exposing WebGL 2). This was not a from-scratch implementation and development of a new API, it was a collaboration and adoption of an existing API shipped in all other major browsers for years.
The Metal ANGLE backend work done by Apple was a large chunk of work, but a lot of it needed to be done anyway to continue to support WebGL at all on Apple platforms given Apple's deprecation of OpenGL.
> OpenGL is being replaced across the industry by modern rendering APIs like Vulkan etc.
Not always true though.
The target hardware is different between the game industry and the web industry.
Games focus on delivering best graphics with the latest hardware, whereas websites should care about the compatibility first.
Even though modern web browsers auto update, it does not update the underlying hardware. That is, many non-latest smartphones that do not support Vulkan won't support WebGPU neither. We need to wait for years to safely use WebGPU.
