Comment by darkwater
9 days ago
Very cool! Now, let see how much will take for G-products to actually use it and not complaining about "browser not supported for this feature, use Chrome".
9 days ago
Very cool! Now, let see how much will take for G-products to actually use it and not complaining about "browser not supported for this feature, use Chrome".
Which google products use it?
The one I can think of is Google Meet, where some GPU-thing is used to add background effects such as blur. However I'm not sure this actually uses WebGPU; it used to use on Firefox until Google added a browser check, and AFAIK, if you could fool Meet to think Firefox was Chrome, it would still work.
This might still be a semi-legitimate thing, i.e maybe they kept around a WebGL implementation for a while as a fallback but moved the main implementation to WebGPU and don't want to maintain the fallback. It certainly fits well into their strategy of making sure that the web really only works properly with Chrome.
Official documentation suggests meet works with Firefox: https://support.google.com/meet/answer/7317473?hl=en#zippy=%...
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I'm on Brave Linux which requires special flag for WebGPU (not turned on for me) and can confirm that background blur still works with Meet without WebGPU
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I don't know :) I was referring basically to the Meet situation back in the day with FF where the feature was there but Meet complained the browser was not capable.
There was a genuine technical reason for that, a part of WebRTC that Firefox hadn’t implemented yet, where if even a single member of a group call lacked that feature, it had to fall back to something that used a lot more CPU for everyone. Can’t remember the details exactly, but it was approximately that.
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