It's my impression that the WebGPU spec design team went to extreme lengths to a...

ykl · 2025-04-23T09:07:59 1745399279

WebGPU works just fine in Safari on my iPhone. It was enabled by default starting with iOS 18.2.

jsheard · 2025-04-23T09:13:12 1745399592

https://caniuse.com/webgpu

Caniuse says it's still behind a feature flag, are you sure you didn't enable that at some point?

ykl · 2025-04-23T09:27:08 1745400428

I don’t recall enabling it.

criddell · 2025-04-23T14:31:31 1745418691

This doesn't load for me on my iPhone or iPad:

https://webgpu.github.io/webgpu-samples/?sample=texturedCube

macintux · 2025-04-23T16:29:29 1745425769

I dug into my iPad and found a feature flag to enable it, hiding in settings/Safari/Advanced.

So definitely not enabled by default yet.

oarsinsync · 2025-04-23T16:26:42 1745425602

Confirmed my M1 iPad Pro iOS 18.4.1 also doesn’t have it enabled. Took a bit of digging in the settings app to discover where to enable feature flags too, confirmed it’s off.

gbear605 · 2025-04-23T12:08:15 1745410095

It’s disabled still on my iPhone on iOS 18.4.1. Either it was enabled specifically on 18.2, and then disabled, or you enabled it manually. (Or some other weird thing, like it’s only enabled on iPhone Pros.)

willtemperley · 2025-04-23T09:13:47 1745399627

Because getting angry about things that are false is insane.

WebGPU is still in progress in Safari - it is available as a technology preview. The same is true for Firefox.

jsheard · 2025-04-23T09:27:51 1745400471

> WebGPU is still in progress in Safari

That's kind of the point, Chrome shipped it across multiple platforms two years ago, while Safari still has no timeframe despite having a much narrower set of APIs and hardware to support. Firefox at least has the excuse of needing broad compatibility like Chrome but with a fraction of the development resources. Apple are just dragging their feet.

troupo · 2025-04-23T11:46:20 1745408780

> That's kind of the point, Chrome shipped it across multiple platforms two years ago

Chrome ships a lot of things. Even now WebGPU is marked as experimental technology on MDN.

WebGPU didn't even become a Candidate Recommendation until December 2024 (half a year ago)

> Apple are just dragging their feet.

Or they are not in any rush to implement APIs that haven't reached consensus, haven't passed reviews, are subject to change etc. Chrome has very very cavalier attitude towards shipping APIs.

threeseed · 2025-04-23T12:45:56 1745412356

> Chrome shipped it across multiple platforms

Chrome has routinely shipped junk APIs with no concern for privacy, security or battery life.

It's why fingerprinting works so incredibly well on their browsers.