WebGL Not Working

[Heath]

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Ubuntu Chromium/43.0.2357.81 Chrome/43.0.2357.81 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce the problem:
1. Visit https://get.webgl.org/
2. Shows WebGL Disabled
3. Look in `chrome://flags/`
4. Look for `Disable WebGL`, this is showing WebGL as enabled

What is the expected behavior?
WebGL works

What went wrong?
Can't use sites that use WebGL

Did this work before? Yes on 6/10/2015 was the last day it worked

Chrome version: 43.0.2357.81 Channel: stable
OS Version: Ubuntu 14.04
Flash Version: Shockwave Flash 16.0 r0

[Chad Miller (cmiller)]

I disabled GPU usage in chromium because GPU crashes (on Intel, Nvidia, and AMD) was the biggest cause of crash reports in all of Ubuntu, by 200%, across all versions, and across all architectures. I'm concerned about lack of functionality, but whatever is causing crashes concerns me more.

[Heath (heathnaylor)]

That is indeed a concerning amount. Have you seen that number drop dramatically since this release rolled out? I never had detrimental crashing issues using WebGL. I am unfamiliar with the Chromium build process but is there a way to disable the feature on update but allow the end user to override that option? I am a developer and one of our products is WebGL driven, I am making due by using Google Chrome for now but it would be nice to have it back in Chromium at some point. Thanks for the work.

[Chad Miller (cmiller)]

https://errors.ubuntu.com/?package=chromium-browser&period=day

The chromium errors have flattened out dramatically. It's still the most common crasher, but only because some people have not updated.

[Maurice (mak-5)]

Hi Chad, thanks for elaborating why you disabled GPU usage. I'd love to turn it back on somehow without the need for rebuilding chromium myself with default options except for the GPU being disabled.

Is there any chance we can get back GPU enabled chromium anytime soon? Or maybe Ubuntu could offer two packages "chromium-browser-stable" and "chromium-browser-experimental". The latter would then have the optimizations turned on.

Another bug report is related to this one here, so I will post a link for reference: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chromium-browser/+bug/1463598

[sfornengo (sfornengo)]

Hi Chad,
is it a joke ?
I am also a developer of a WebGL driven App and I am very disappointed by this way to hide problems, especially on a ubuntu 14.04 LTS version on which previous chromium version with GPU enabled worked great.
How to rollback to chromium 42 with GPU enabled ?

[Emmeran (emmeran)]

First of, thank You, @cmiller, for maintaining this package!
I can understand your motivation to disable GPU rendering in Chromium, but I suspect that you yourself don't use WebGL apps a lot. I'm a developer, too, and WebGL is the centerpiece of some of my projects. WebGL is a very useful thing that I imagine grows in popularity fast. Maybe I'm biased due to my occupation, but in my opinion, WebGL is a very important feature of Chromium, that should not be disabled if at all possible. Especially not without any notification to the users and without any way to turn it back on.

Events like Chromium suddently not having WebGL support any more are turning people away from using Linux. I think to disable it is a big mistake and should be reverted immediately. Honestly I'm surprised there's not more outrage about this. At least use the "Disable WebGL" flag in chrome://flags - the average user is not gonna turn it back on themselves.

If you want to prevent crash logs from WebGL surely there must be another way, like filtering the crash reports for WebGL related issues. I'm not sure how crash reporting is implemented, but I trust that it should be doable. By the way, WebGL can be very stable. At least it is for me. I don't know why it's generating so many crash reports. Maybe it's bad graphics cards, bad drivers or bad code, but it's not like WebGL itself is unusable or very unstable for everyone.

I'm wondering why it's only Chromium giving you so many crash reports. Do Firefox and Chrome not report crashes, are they less used, handling crashes internally or just not crashing in the first place?

I hope this can be resolved soon.

[Pascal Opitz (pascalopitz)]

Hi, is there any way to get this re-enabled?

[Mihara (medvedev)]

> I'm concerned about lack of functionality, but whatever is causing crashes concerns me more.

Which is why you elect not to know anything about the cause, because GPU-related crashes can no longer happen in the first place, since you disabled GPU usage completely.

Feels like a contradiction, doesn't it?

[Heath (heathnaylor)]

I see no benefit in attacking his decision. He knows of the issue and our desire to have web gl at least be able to be turned on via chrome flags. The resolution of the core cause is probably outside the scope of the chromium project. Linux has never had great wide spread graphics card support and performance.

Chad, can we get a firm commitment to either a long term resolution or an ability to opt into web gl moving forward?

Thank you.

[Richard Penman (richardpenman)]

ah, glad I found this. Already wasted a few hours trying to figure why WebGL would not work in this version. Is there a workaround or have to use a different version?

Why not just disable it by default but still allow this to be enabled in chrome://flags?

[Emmeran (emmeran)]

Chad's communcation lacks a bit, but for now, WebGL is re-enabled for me.
Changelog from https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chromium-browser/43.0.2357.130-0ubuntu1.1188
#####
* Reenable GPU usage on Wily only. Silent disabling is probably a
    bad idea. On all other distros, default to off, but don't blacklist.
#####

A bad idea indeed. Thanks for changing it back. I suggest adding some kind of notification for all other distros so people know that it's disabled.

[Heath (heathnaylor)]

What do I need to do to get this on Ubuntu 14.04? I have Version 43.0.2357.130 Ubuntu 14.04 (64-bit) but no WebGL fix.