Interest in WebCL is expanding as exemplified by the Nokia WebCL project that has released a Firefox plugin to run WebCL apps. Developers now have a choice of running WebCL in Chrome via AMD and Firefox with the Nokia plugin.
(Firefox, Chrome and Safari all have some form of WebCL support.)
The continued expansion of WebCL proof-of-concept implementations signals a belief that concerns over potential security risks are being addressed. At this time, a number of steps have been taken to secure WebCL against exploits including: (1) dropping risky OpenCL features like pointers, (2) having the runtime check for exploit behavior, and (3) the creation of a validation tool by the Khronos group that can perform static analysis. Driver hardening also plays an important security role, but this is not standards based but rather is a volunteer effort by the driver developers.
The potential upside ranges from gaming and augmented reality to mesmerizing browser-based eye-candy. Since it is an open ended computational programming environment, WebCL provides a tremendous opportunity to exploit parallelism on client-side machines. Having support for two popular browsers is clearly a step in the right direction as it gives more people the ability to see, hands-on, the potential and also exposure in the wild to see what exploits can be found in the current implementations.
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