WebKit 3D CSS transforms coming to Snow Leopard, not Leopard

While WebKit contains support for Apple's proposed CSS-based 3D transforms, Apple may never enable the support in Leopard. Support is ready for Snow Leopard, coming this fall, but failing to enable the support for all platforms may put the standard in limbo.<BR><BR><a href='http://meincmagazine.com/apple/news/2009/06/webkit-3d-css-transforms-coming-to-snow-leopard-not-leopard.ars'>Read the whole story</a>

 

[bedward]

If they support 3D transforms on Windows XP but not Leopard, the fireworks should be impressive.

 

[bentruyman]

Maybe I'm missing something here, but I've already created 3D CSS Transforms demos for both Firefox 3.5 and Safari 4 Beta on Leopard. Does this mean when Apple officially releases Safari 4 that they'll disable it?

 

[jdw]

I'm not 100% sure what this means, but it <I>sounds</I> like 3D spinning billboards will be the new blink tag.

 

[[S]Replicant]

It's not really that much of a stumbling block towards adoption, since we're only talking about one browser with limited market share on a platform with limited market share.<BR><BR>As for why? Seems pretty obviouse. Sell more copies of Snow Leopard. This is the Apple modus operandi... sell people something, then come out with something new a year later and get everyone to pay all over again for what is (for all intents and purposes) no more than an iterative upgrade.

 

[mrsteveman1]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by bentruyman:<BR>Maybe I'm missing something here, but I've already created 3D CSS Transforms demos for both Firefox 3.5 and Safari 4 Beta on Leopard. Does this mean when Apple officially releases Safari 4 that they'll disable it? </div></BLOCKQUOTE><BR><BR>Safari 4 has already been released....<BR><BR><BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by Replicant:<BR>As for why? Seems pretty obviouse. Sell more copies of Snow Leopard. This is the Apple modus operandi... sell people something, then come out with something new a year later and get everyone to pay all over again for what is (for all intents and purposes) no more than an iterative upgrade. </div></BLOCKQUOTE><BR><BR>You make it sound evil.....it's commercial software, they want money to keep developing it.

 

[zelannii]

All you folks with PowerPC based Macs that are complaining of lack of feature support, STFU already... You're using 3+ year old kit (at least). So what, the latest, greatest features don't run on your machine. Most things still do. <BR><BR>My wife's 1 year old notebook won't run Win7... My 2 year old gaming rig will need an upgrade to go to 7. Half the hardware I own isn't compatible with Vista or 7, and little of it is more than 3 years old... (it all works with my intel iMac though). <BR><BR>If it's a business machine you're complaining about, it's 100% depreciated by now. Get a new one already, you're loosing tax writeoff potential! Sell the old box, buy a new one, and start writing down 33% of it each year again... If it's a personal machine, the $999 notebook is FAR more powerful than anything you currently own, aside from potentially a few G5 towers out there that are not owned by businesses. <BR><BR>Put your old machine on eBay (it's probably worth at least a 1/3 of what a new one costs, I sold a 1GH 17" iMac swivel screen for $700 last year!) Go get a new machine already....<BR><BR>If you can't afford to replace your machine, you better start saving quick for one anyway. Those G5 parts are getting harder and harder to come by, and repairs to your machine (especially a motherboard) are rediculously priced... If you G5 goes down, good luck getting it back up. NEVER run on hardware you can't afford to fix unless you can afford to not have hardware running at all. <BR><BR>And seriously, short of a performance improvement, and a couple of 3D wizbangs, wtf are you missing sticking with Leapord?

 

[murphy]

Where exactly is the support for the headline "WebKit 3D CSS transforms coming to Snow Leopard, not Leopard"? Is this story really based on a throwaway comment in a bug tracker?

 

[WiseWeasel]

Something tells me they won't add support where they can't guarantee a decent end user experience (smooth rendering and animation performance), and they are thus limiting it to platforms that will guarantee certain 3D capabilities (availability of T&L graphics hardware, sufficient CPU specs, etc.), so that there is no perceptible effect on your computer's performance and responsiveness from these animations (they want to avoid the dreaded Flash-type bogging down the system effect). This might mean that they consider Leopard to run on too broad of a selection of systems, some of which fall outside these capabilities, and that the higher system requirements for Snow Leopard guarantees that any computer running that OS in a supported manner should have good performance with these animations. <BR><BR>On the Windows side, we might see that the feature is only enabled on computers running Vista or higher with the Aero interface. <BR><BR>Apple is probably trying to avoid software rendering (versus GPU-accelerated rendering) and choppy browser performance at all costs.

 

[eldonyo]

Apple has never been concerned with backward compatibility, so why should they start now?

 

[Medic Terrible]

Looks like zelannii woke up on the wrong side of the bed.<BR><BR>Also, I'm not sure how your gaming machine would need an upgrade considering that there are people running 7 on their little netbooks. My mid-range gaming system I put together in 06 (2 months before Core 2 Duo came out, grrr) runs 7 perfectly fine (3800x2, 2gb of ddr400) - my uncle is now using it as his main machine.<BR><BR>Anyways, I have no stake in either Snow Leopard or Leopard, but there are people who choose to keep their old stuff around, whether for their own use, or for their friends/family. People are going to have different priorities, especially when it comes to buying a new thing to replace something that was working perfectly fine.

 

[Metasyntactic]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by zelannii:<BR>All you folks with PowerPC based Macs that are complaining of lack of feature support, STFU already... You're using 3+ year old kit (at least). So what, the latest, greatest features don't run on your machine. Most things still do. <BR><BR>My wife's 1 year old notebook won't run Win7... </div></BLOCKQUOTE>Your wife got robbed. My 5 year old computers run Win7. I'm guessing my older computers would as well, i just no longer have them.

 

[Solomonoff's Secret]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by eldonyo:<BR><BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by Replicant:<BR>As for why? Seems pretty obviouse. Sell more copies of Snow Leopard. This is the Apple modus operandi... sell people something, then come out with something new a year later and get everyone to pay all over again for what is (for all intents and purposes) no more than an iterative upgrade. </div></BLOCKQUOTE><BR><BR>You make it sound evil.....it's commercial software, they want money to keep developing it. </div></BLOCKQUOTE><BR>If 3D CSS transforms is already working in Leopard, Apple would be crippling one product (which is open source and free) to make money on another product. That's morally questionable in my book...<BR><BR><BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by eldonyo:<BR>Apple has never been concerned with backward compatibility, so why should they start now? </div></BLOCKQUOTE><BR>If it already works, why go out of your way to disable it?

 

[Chemical Tribe]

"My wife's 1 year old notebook won't run Win7.."<BR><BR>My 4 year old Dell 700m surprisingly runs Vista just fine, sans Aero though, on 512MB of memory. Might run slow when more than SR Iron opens up, but it runs smoother than XP ever did. It also lasts around 13 more minutes playing DVDs in Vista than it does in XP. Go figure.<BR><BR>Win7 runs on it too, except for some dumb reason, they don't have a graphics driver for the 855GM I have. Dumb.

 

[schnee]

I feel the same way about every browser's proprietary extensions. Anything that encourages further balkanization of the web is something I ignore as much as possible for any site that can conceivably serve a wide audience.

 

[videoart]

I don't know what this story is about. CSS Transforms, Animations work fine in Safari 4 on Leopard now!<BR><BR>If you are using Safari 4 see it working here http://webkit.org/blog-files/leaves/index.html

 

[Solomonoff's Secret]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by videoart:<BR>I don't know what this story is about. CSS Transforms, Animations work fine in Safari 4 on Leopard now!<BR><BR>If you are using Safari 4 see it working here http://webkit.org/blog-files/leaves/index.html </div></BLOCKQUOTE><BR>This article is about 3D animations; that is a 2D one.

 

[cobra libre]

It might be a simple matter of testing resources, time, and money.

 

[johneee]

Well, on the one hand I don't know if it's really balkanization when they have submitted it as a standard, but I guess it is if nobody else ever implements it.<BR><BR>Did MS ever submit the page transitions in IE as a standard? Boy those were tacky.

 

[schnee]

Oh, the submitted it? Awesome, I didn't read that far before I posted, hehe. Better, but we'll see.

 

[bentruyman]

This is what I was talking about:<BR>http://redmelon.net/tstme/box_model/<BR><BR>I'm using Safari 4 right now and this example works. Skew, rotate, etc. all appear to work. Was the author possibly confused with transitions/animations?

 

[inpher]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by bentruyman:<BR>This is what I was talking about:<BR>http://redmelon.net/tstme/box_model/<BR><BR>I'm using Safari 4 right now and this example works. Skew, rotate, etc. all appear to work. Was the author possibly confused with transitions/animations? </div></BLOCKQUOTE><BR><BR>That is an embedded flash movie explaining the concept. Don't believe me? Check the markup:<BR> <pre class="ip-ubbcode-code-pre"><OBJECT classid="clsid27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000"
codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,0,0"
WIDTH="650" HEIGHT="390" id="BoxModel" ALIGN="">
<PARAM NAME=movie VALUE="Box_Model.swf"> <PARAM NAME=quality VALUE=high> <PARAM NAME=bgcolor VALUE=#FFFFFF>
<EMBED src="Box_Model.swf" quality=high bgcolor=#FFFFFF WIDTH="650" HEIGHT="390" NAME="BoxModel" ALIGN=""
TYPE="application/x-shockwave-flash" PLUGINSPAGE="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer"></EMBED>
</OBJECT>
</pre>

 

[Paul Eccles]

Was about to say, dude that's flash. I know coz I use the click2flash flash blocker.

 

[RDF]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by murphy:<BR>Where exactly is the support for the headline "WebKit 3D CSS transforms coming to Snow Leopard, not Leopard"? Is this story really based on a throwaway comment in a bug tracker? </div></BLOCKQUOTE><BR><BR>Exactly... this article is premature at best. The author is making a huge leap in the assumption he makes based on vague comments made from an Apple developer. Its more like that there is no story here.<BR><BR>What's even more amusing though is watching the replies in this thread as if any assumption is this article is actually true.

 

[foresmac108]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by WiseWeasel:<BR>Something tells me they won't add support where they can't guarantee a decent end user experience (smooth rendering and animation performance), and they are thus limiting it to platforms that will guarantee certain 3D capabilities (availability of T&L graphics hardware, sufficient CPU specs, etc.), so that there is no perceptible effect on your computer's performance and responsiveness from these animations (they want to avoid the dreaded Flash-type bogging down the system effect). This might mean that they consider Leopard to run on too broad of a selection of systems, some of which fall outside these capabilities, and that the higher system requirements for Snow Leopard guarantees that any computer running that OS in a supported manner should have good performance with these animations. <BR><BR>On the Windows side, we might see that the feature is only enabled on computers running Vista or higher with the Aero interface. <BR><BR>Apple is probably trying to avoid software rendering (versus GPU-accelerated rendering) and choppy browser performance at all costs. </div></BLOCKQUOTE><BR><BR>The issue, in my mind, is that if it can run on an iPhone with an OS based on Leopard and a 412MHz CPU with an OpenGL ES 1.1 compliant GPU core, I don't see how it <I>can't</I> run on desktop machines capable of running Leopard. That means an 867Mhz or faster G4 or better, and a GPU compatible with Core Image, which is probably what Apple is tying the 3D transforms into. <BR><BR>It seems ridiculous to state that there is something standing in the way of flipping the switch on for Leopard but not state what it is. On the basis of technology alone, it doesn't appear to be an issue. If it were so friggin' hard for Apple to do, how is it that Mozilla was able to pull it off in Firefox 3.5?<BR><BR><I>This comment was edited by foresmac108 on July 01, 2009 14:56</I>

 

[foresmac108]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by RDF:<BR><BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by murphy:<BR>Where exactly is the support for the headline "WebKit 3D CSS transforms coming to Snow Leopard, not Leopard"? Is this story really based on a throwaway comment in a bug tracker? </div></BLOCKQUOTE><BR><BR>Exactly... this article is premature at best. The author is making a huge leap in the assumption he makes based on vague comments made from an Apple developer. Its more like that there is no story here. </div></BLOCKQUOTE><BR>If it's a "throwaway" comment, as you suggest, why even bother posting it to the bug tracker? Furthermore, this is the only thing anyone from Apple has said about the issue publicly. Since you've likely never attempted to get comments from anyone at Apple, you're probably unaware that it's like trying to wring blood from a stone.

 

[CroP]

I was just reading about the issue of erroneous celebrity death reporting this weekend (see Colbert and Goldblum on Monday). This news reminds of that. There is no proof that this is final policy. It may end up being so, maybe not. Could be this "news" is like the issue of the SATA firmware for MacBooks. Pro Apple-ites say it was an oversight or was going to be changed; those in the middle don't know, assume there might be some reason, and discuss technical issues; and anti-Apple folks see it as a conspiracy or the heavy hand of Jobs and evidence of his love for sucking money from Mac lovers. Maybe this is just a blog post -- as developers don't get to make these types of decisions at Apple. At the very least, it's interesting if 1) you care about advanced Web (proposed) standards or 2) you just like to chat about rumors or bash/support Apple.<BR><BR>No harm no matter what the end result, as it seems fun for some people to discuss, but it is funny to see how rumors and small, unofficial statements can make waves. Ars tends to be a more enlightened group, so head over to Engadget to yap about the latest unsubstantiated tid bit with either no evidence or no logic. OK, I'm procrastinating, I admit it. Back to work.

 

[WiseWeasel]

<BLOCKQUOTE class="ip-ubbcode-quote"><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div><div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by foresmac108:<BR>The issue, in my mind, is that if it can run on an iPhone with an OS based on Leopard and a 412MHz CPU with an OpenGL ES 1.1 compliant GPU core, I don't see how it <I>can't</I> run on desktop machines capable of running Leopard. That means an 867Mhz or faster G4 or better, and a GPU compatible with Core Image, which is probably what Apple is tying the 3D transforms into. <BR><BR>It seems ridiculous to state that there is something standing in the way of flipping the switch on for Leopard but not state what it is. On the basis of technology alone, it doesn't appear to be an issue. If it were so friggin' hard for Apple to do, how is it that Mozilla was able to pull it off in Firefox 3.5? </div></BLOCKQUOTE><BR>Are you sure that all Macs capable of running Leopard have video cards that support Core Image? I thought there were cases where older Macs could run Leopard with Core Image disabled. Maybe I'm confusing Core Image and Quartz Extreme. I do know there are Macs running Leopard that have Quartz Extreme disabled; maybe that's how they implemented the feature? [/clueless]<BR><BR>As for Mozilla, it's possible they're not quite as worried about edge cases or falling back on CPU rendering, where some low end computers might get noticeably bogged down. The difference between Apple and Mozilla is that Apple has to make their computers look good as well as their browser. Mozilla has no qualms making your computer act its age (where age > two-year-old gaming rig).

 

[jahrends]

<blockquote class="ip-ubbcode-quote">
<div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-title">quote:</div>
<div class="ip-ubbcode-quote-content">Originally posted by zelannii:<br>All you folks with PowerPC based Macs that are complaining of lack of feature support, STFU already... You're using 3+ year old kit (at least). So what, the latest, greatest features don't run on your machine. Most things still do. <br><br>My wife's 1 year old notebook won't run Win7... My 2 year old gaming rig will need an upgrade to go to 7. Half the hardware I own isn't compatible with Vista or 7, and little of it is more than 3 years old... (it all works with my intel iMac though). <br><br> </div>
</blockquote>
<br><br>I think the issue with some PowerPC based Mac users is the fact that we are used to Macs lasting a REALLY long time. I am typing this on my MacBook Pro (Intel) but under my desk is my Dual 1GHz G4. I still use this box. It is going on 7 years old. I am not upset that Snow Leopard won't be getting installed on it because I know that Snow Leopard would do nothing really to improve performance on it. yes it is an almost Ancient computer by normal standards but it works and works VERY well. I agree that last time I looked I found the same machine selling for around $700. Most Mac computers hold their value well. I would be surprised to see a 7 year old PC run Vista or 7. When I bought this box we were a PC family and NONE of the PCs that we had then are even worth booting.<br><br>Oh and to top it off I will most likely upgrade the procs on my G4 to the dual 1.8GHz and use the thing till it dies. I am thinking the box should give me another 3 or 4 years -- View image here: http://episteme.meincmagazine.com/groupee_common/emoticons/icon_smile.gif --<br><br>I hope that answers why some people would be upset if a box that has the ability to function is left out in the cold. I just don't think that has happened yet with these boxes.

 

[willmo]

Not that anyone will likely see this comment, but if you look back at the bug report, this was apparently fixed a few days ago. (Can't test for myself right now.)

 

[RobertBlack]

If you know of any sites using Webkit's 3D CSS tranforms, please submit them to: http://3dSafariSites.com