Sim runs without webgl on Mac 10.11 chrome

[KatieWoe]

Device
Dirac
OS
10.11.6 and 10.12.6 (and 10.10 but this browser is not supported there)
Browser
Chrome
Problem Description
For phetsims/qa#279 and phetsims/qa#280
WebGL seems to be off for the latest google chrome on Mac 10.11.6. webgl=true does not seem to do anything. Webgl does not seem to be off for the other browsers on 10.11, and has not seemed to be off on chrome on 10.14 or 10.13. Is a problem in published version

[jonathanolson]

What does the Report a Problem / troubleshooting info for the sim say about WebGL status? (on Dirac)

[KatieWoe]

Troubleshooting information (do not edit):
Name: ‪Molecule Shapes: Basics‬
URL: https://phet-dev.colorado.edu/html/molecule-shapes-basics/1.2.0-rc.1/phet/molecule-shapes-basics_en_phet.html
Version: 1.2.0-rc.1 2019-02-01 18:53:54 UTC
Features missing: touch
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/72.0.3626.119 Safari/537.36
Language: en-US
Window: 1180x698
Pixel Ratio: 1/1
WebGL: WebGL 1.0 (OpenGL ES 2.0 Chromium)
GLSL: WebGL GLSL ES 1.0 (OpenGL ES GLSL ES 1.0 Chromium)
Vendor: WebKit (WebKit WebGL)
Vertex: attribs: 32 varying: 32 uniform: 256
Texture: size: 8192 imageUnits: 16 (vertex: 16, combined: 32)
Max viewport: 8192x8192
OES_texture_float: true
Dependencies JSON: {}

[jonathanolson]

Interesting. Just tested, and it looks like WebGL is potentially "technically" supported on Dirac, however because we provide the option failIfMajorPerformanceCaveat, the sim won't use it. I manually tested without that, and WebGL is SLOW if we use it (the canvas fallback is much nicer on Dirac).

@KatieWoe is there a good place to note that Dirac (or probably other devices like it) will not use WebGL due to the performance drawback?

[KatieWoe]

I'll make a note to add it to the QA book. Why was it only on chrome?

[jonathanolson]

I didn't check the other browsers, but if it's only Chrome doing that then it's probably due to Chrome blacklisting the GPU or OS.

[KatieWoe]

Firefox is doing some other weird graphical things. #161

[jonathanolson]

It seems the Firefox item is either unrelated (if it's a security issue that caused the blacklisting), or potentially due to general bugginess. Unassigning.

[jonathanolson]

Since I believe we shouldn't change behavior here, I'm marking as will-not-fix.

[arouinfar]

Since this is tagged as wontfix, I'll close.