browser support for Unity webGL

I was dismayed to find that webGL projects don't run on iPad running iOS 8.1 or iPhone 6+ iOS 8.1 even though webGL is supported from iOS 8 upwards. Also Unity webGL projects won't run on IE 11 even though it supports webGL. Will the official release have the same limitations or will this change? It'd be a shame to not have this work on any mobile devices.

 

WebGL from browser perspective only means graphics but there are more than that from engine perspective. For example I don't think audio is supported on iOS8 Safari even if you could get it to run and/or it would be limited to max 1 sound at time. I would not expect webgl exported projects to work "properly" on mobile platforms for a year or two at least. iOS and many other mobile platform browsers have severe limitations of available memory for pages so you can't really run even most of the 1st generation iPhone grade games with them.

 

We do and will not support mobile browsers in Unity 5.0; right now it's still very early for mobiles and they lack the entire feature set needed to run Unity WebGL content.

Supported browsers are Chrome and Firefox for Desktop only. IE11 misses WebAudio currently.

 

Also the downside to Apple having success with their app store is that they lost a major incentive to put all the latest gubbins in their mobile browser as soon as possible and optimise it heavily. Clearly they still care about javascript in general running fast on iOS, but beyond that there could be snags in certain areas that take a long time to sort.

More generally, the number of technologies that have been placed under the shorthand banner of WebGL is rather large, and I think its going to take quite a long time for stuff like Unity's WebGL to really be equivalent to the web player, let alone work well on mobile devices. I think they've done really well to get it working as well as it does so far, but with the likes of IE on the scene I don't expect miracles.

 

thanks for the info guys. its a bit depressing that it wont work at all on mobile or IE, not even with less features. That has cut out a fair chunk of users who surf the net. I will just stick with three.js for now since that works everywhere

 

Last I checked, IE11 also did not play nicely with PBR in the new Standard Shader though that was an earlier beta, and no webaudio for the same reason mobile isn't supported. WebGL is kind of like HTML5 at the moment and the entire featureset is not supported in every browser (and in some cases a variation of it).