No doubt WebGL looks like a really nice tech, however the situation is looking very similar to what happen with SVG on the web. Great tech, lots of initial hype, supported by everyone except IE. Due to IE not supporting it everyone was forced to avoid it. Are MS going to allow a tech that brings OpenGL ES to the masses and risks them loosing their Directx strangle hold? Unlikley IMO.
And that’s a developer’s choice. If you can get consistent, playable framerates with WebGL, then it doesn’t matter if JOGL or LWJGL would be 5 times faster.
This has nothing to do with Apple. People will access your web page through the browser, Safari on the iPhone. Apple is already pushing HTML 5 for video on iPhone and iPad.
There is still no official support of Flash & Java on IPhone and for the same reason, Apple won’t support WebGL. Apple is pushing HTML 5 for video in order to avoid relying on Flash. Don’t be blind. As kapta said, WebGL is a problem for Microsoft too… I hope that the war of web browsers will force them to support WebGL and contribute to improve the OpenGL drivers on computers.
Lots of people use crappy integrated chips. Who will accept developing games for a very reduced audience because of the bad performances of WebGL and the bad drivers for these chips?
Actually I found the startup times to be far slower… 
I did try the webstart version of jake2, and it actually failed with an error about self signed certificates. No idea why since i use a self signed certificate for my own webstart jogl. I just updated OSX to latest patch, so maybe something to do with that.
Anyway, I’m not convinced that the performance benefit of JOGL is enough to fight off WebGL. Lets wait for browsers to support WebGL in a production build, and then see where we stand against the upcomming JOGL2.
For me the benefit I see with WebGL is already demonstrated by the jake2 port, and that’s the startup speed and simplicity. If we really can have a common API between JOGL2 ES2 and WebGL ES2, then I’ll use the WebGL front end to ‘sell’ the game and offer a webstart option for those looking for a bit more performance.
IE9 supports SVG. GLES is a different thing though indeed.
Webkit (Apple’s browser engine) supports WebGL since the very beginning.
Edit: Apple is also part of the WebGL working group (just like Mozilla, Opera, and Google).
bit late won’t you say? we’re still looking at another 2-3 years before IE9 is even relevant and even then the non SVG IE’s will have significant market share.
By the time its any use, you’d probably be able to do all the stuff in something like pure javascript or html5.
Its nice PR to make it look like they are helping standards, yet they just derailed and delayed it until its obsolete.
Nah… some vector image format is absolutely needed. Of course there is some sort of overlap with canvas, but the use cases actually don’t overlap.
And PR… well, they are just desperately trying to catch up, which means more competitions, which means more progress. Google’s V8 for example radically changed the JavaScript landscape. Without it there would have been less of a reason to improve. And if modern browsers aren’t that much better than IE (of all things!) anymore, there will be lots of pressure to do things better/faster.