WebGL works on Firefox but not on Chrome - Windows

[Mauro Herrada]

Good morning, everyone. After surfing the web for a few days, I'm resigned to finding a solution by myself. I have attached the info on chrome://gpu

The driver is from 2016, and the renderer is ANGLE (Intel(R) HD Graphics 5500 Direct3D11 vs_5_0 ps_5_0).

Any idea what's going on?

Thank you,

Hector

[Ken Russell]

Everything looks like it should be working. What happens if you visit this page:

https://webglsamples.org/aquarium/aquarium.html

Are any error messages displayed either at the bottom of about:gpu or in the JavaScript console?

-Ken

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[Mauro Herrada]

Ken, thank you for the prompt reply. The aquarium works on Firefox but not on Chrome. The attachment shows that WebGL might have been disabled by enterprise policy or command line switch. There are no errors in the console and the gpu file is the same as in my original post.

Any thoughts?

On Monday, March 5, 2018 at 1:56:20 PM UTC-6, Kenneth Russell wrote:

Everything looks like it should be working. What happens if you visit this page:

https://webglsamples.org/aquarium/aquarium.html

Are any error messages displayed either at the bottom of about:gpu or in the JavaScript console?

-Ken

On Mon, Mar 5, 2018 at 8:53 AM, Mauro Herrada <hector....@gmail.com> wrote:

Good morning, everyone. After surfing the web for a few days, I'm resigned to finding a solution by myself. I have attached the info on chrome://gpu

The driver is from 2016, and the renderer is ANGLE (Intel(R) HD Graphics 5500 Direct3D11 vs_5_0 ps_5_0).

Any idea what's going on?

Thank you,

Hector

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[Ken Russell]

Hi Mauro,

Sorry, I'm not sure what is going on. I note that you are running Windows 8.1. The Chrome team doesn't run tests on that OS version on a regular basis. You will probably have better luck if you upgrade to Windows 10.

-Ken

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[Gu, Yang]

I noticed below lines under “Problem Detected”:

Some drivers are unable to reset the D3D device in the GPU process sandbox
Applied Workarounds: exit_on_context_lost

 

What will happen if you add option “--disable-gpu-driver-bug-workarounds”?

 

Regards,

-Yang

[Mauro Herrada]

Thanks for the reply, Yang. I have attached the new gpu file. The aquarium does not work still.

Hector

[Gu, Yang]

OK, then this is not the root cause. Is this your personal computer or company’s? If it’s the latter, would you mind having another check of your registry (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Policies\Google\Chrome\Disable3DAPIs) to see if WebGL is disabled.

Reference: https://www.chromium.org/administrators/policy-list-3#Disable3DAPIs

 

Regards,

-Yang

[Mauro Herrada]

This is a company computer. Please look at the attachment. It looks like this flag is on.

[Mauro Herrada]

Setting the flag to false did the trick. I'll follow up with IT to see if we can change the registry values corp-wide.

Thank you for all the help!

Hector

[Zhenyao Mo]

Due to recent redesign, commandline switch or enterprise policy decisions are no longer part of the about:gpu page, i.e., about:gpu page's WebGL status only tells the underlying GPU/driver's capabilities to support WebGL, but if a user/user group decides against it, WebGL will still be disabled (the context creation error message will provide the failure reason, but not the about:gpu page).

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[Ed Mackey]

Just curious, is there a longer-term plan to deprecate or remove the Disable3DAPIs flag?  Will security/stability improve to the point where it no longer makes sense to allow individual organizations to turn it off independently from the rest of JavaScript?

           --Ed.

[Gu, Yang]

I think one enhancement here is to direct user to the exact registry key so that they may check at first sight of issue.

 

Regards,

-Yang

[Ed Mackey]

Possibly.  My concern is that, during the infancy and first couple years of WebGL, a lot of advice circulated the Internet telling people to turn off WebGL for a variety of reasons based on these early releases.  Over the years, WebGL has continued to improve its reliability and utility, but many IT organizations still have rules baked into their best practices that involve turning off WebGL, sometimes just for the sake of being one less thing for IT to worry about supporting for their users.  Often, users are powerless to overturn decisions made by system administrators.

My hope is that someday, maybe even today, the old kill switch is no longer needed.  I don't know of a browser that offers a switch to turn off 2D canvas or the JavaScript Date object.  Is there a real, long-term need to be able to turn off WebGL but leave the rest of JavaScript enabled?  What purpose does that serve?  Just food for thought.

           --Ed.

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[Zhenyao Mo]

I was quite surprised the enterprise policy ends up in the registry key and you can actually modify it? I thought it's something an IT administrator holds and users should not have access.

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[Mauro Herrada]

I'd second Ed's thoughts. Removing the Disable3DAPIs flag if it's no longer necessary is the way to go. I recently learned that there are 23k installations of Chrome in my firm. For one reason or another, the IT department will not be changing the registry policies any time soon. It seems that we are stuck with IE...

[Mauro Herrada]

I have elevated privileges to make certain changes. Although I was able to make the change and verify that this was indeed the issue, the registry reverted back to its original state soon after I rebooted.

[Zhenyao Mo]

Although I very much would like to see that policy option to go away, it may not be an easy change to make. As far as I understand the process, these options are requested by our enterprise customers. As far as some of them still want it, Chrome will need to support it. It's unfortunate.

I think you will have better luck to convince your own IT guy than we (Chrome team) convince all enterprise customers.

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[Mark Callow]

On Mar 8, 2018, at 7:31, Mauro Herrada <hector....@gmail.com> wrote:

I'd second Ed's thoughts. Removing the Disable3DAPIs flag

Thirded! Having a flag like that sends a message that the 3DAPIs (why plural?) have security issues.

Regards

    -Mark

[Ed Mackey]

It's plural because the now-deprecated Pepper 3D API is included in the list of things disabled.  This was actually cited by one of our customers as a good reason to turn it off, but, this is going away of its own accord, so the reasoning is no longer valid.

Thankfully my own IT guys have not set the flag on me, but plenty of customer sites have strict IT rules that come from seemingly unreachable bureaucracies.  I think it should be worth some effort to try to set a schedule at least for when the flag could get removed in the future.  We shouldn't have it forever, it was just a growing pain of WebGL.

           --Ed.

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[Kai Ninomiya]

I wonder, does Disable3DAPIs block WebGL content completely? If it doesn't fall back to SwiftShader software rendering, we should probably fix that (and tweak the wording of Disable3DAPIs to match).

I think we should at least explore the idea of removing the Disable3DAPIs flag, even if it's not likely to happen.

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[Zhenyao Mo]

No, it doesn't fallback to SwiftShader. We only fall back to SwiftShader if we detect the underlying GPU/driver is incapable of supporting WebGL. Disable3DAPIs or commandline switch --disable-webgl is client decision not to have WebGL.

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[Mauro Herrada]

Where can I get background info on why this policy exist?
Thanks

[Zhenyao Mo]

Here is some history: http://crbug.com/64806

On Tue, Mar 20, 2018 at 4:48 PM Mauro Herrada <hector....@gmail.com> wrote:

Does anyone know where I can find background information on why this policy flag was implemented in the first place? 

[Ed Mackey]

If I'm reading that right, it was requested by the security team, near the end of the year prior to the initial release of WebGL 1.0.

Almost 8 years later now, surely the security situation has evolved from those early days.  Among other changes, Pepper 3D is no longer a concern.  This flag should be deprecated, and eventually removed.

           --Ed.

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[Zhenyao Mo]

You will get a message "disabled by enterprise policy or commandline
switch" in WebGLContextCreationError when trying to create a WebGL context
but failing.

chrome://gpu is about gpu capabilities, and this is client side decision.

On Tue, Mar 27, 2018 at 3:06 PM Tarek Sherif <tsh...@gmail.com> wrote:

> This is interesting. I wasn't aware of the Disable3DAPIs flag. I'm sure
we've had some support tickets related to it. How would one check if it's
enabled on Mac and Linux? Do other browsers have similar flags that we
could check for?

> I'll add my vote to removing the flag, if possible, or barring that,
making it clear in chrome://gpu that it's enabled.

[Mauro Herrada]

I'm still attempting to get corp policy to enable WebGL on all computers. They are requesting information about the WebGL license. I was not able to find anything, though. Do you know if such information is available anywhere? Thank you

[Ed Mackey]

The WebGL implementation is built into the browser, and is already covered by the browser's license.  There's no additional license required for enabling WebGL, it's enabled by default on consumer machines.

       --Ed.

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