When I said that GlowScript runs on all browsers, I should have said
"except on mobile devices". Sorry 'bout that. About the only widely
available environment where WebGL works on mobile devices is Firefox on
Android, nor has GlowScript caught up with this recent development to
handle touch gestures properly. Moreover, as recently as a month ago an
update to Android Firefox made GlowScript programmers suddenly run twice as
fast as before, without me doing anything, which shows you how new this all
is. And as I said, even on desktop/laptop machines one may have to tell the
browser to allow WebGL to run, and if you don't have GPUs WebGL can't run.
All of this is presumably temporary, but I thought it prudent to prepare
for the future.
Here in Santa Fe I have a colleague Ed Angel who is the author of the by
far most widely used computer science graduate-level textbook on computer
graphics, "Interactive Computer Graphics". His textbook has always been
based on the widely used OpenGL 3D graphics library, from which WebGL is
derived. He tells me that the CS computer graphics world sees WebGL as most
definitely the future of computer graphics, and he feels so strongly that
this is the case that the next edition of his textbook, which he's
currently working on, will be based on WebGL instead of OpenGL.
I agree that it's a problem having to use some library, which puts you at
the mercy of what the library builders think is good for you. Alas, if you
want 3D in a browser, you have to use the WebGL graphics library. In fact,
even that's not really feasible, because like OpenGL, WebGL is a very
low-level library. As a consequence, people using WebGL almost always use
libraries that make WebGL significantly easier to use. I have the
impression that the most widely used of these is three.js. Even these
higher-level libraries are really designed for hard-core programmers who
have much more programming experience than most physicists have.
What GlowScript attempts to do, as is the case with VPython, is to make it
feasible for ordinary mortals to write navigable real-time 3D animations.