WebGL

Raised as a usability problem by 25 people on Hacker News over 15 years (2011–2025), in 20 threads.

People raised many different problems with WebGL, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 25 complaints

Couldn't figure out how to act beyond walking; controls too sensitive to use2025-09-27
Camera and controls frustrating; invisible walls hard to discern, made player quit2025-09-27
Users must discover that clicking the image corner moves the crop selection, and the Crop button isn't obvious2025-04-28
Raw state-sensitive API is hard to internalize and easy to misuse2023-07-17
WebGL sites run at very low frame rates, making them practically unusable on iPhone2022-03-15
Developers must inject hidden text and build toggles to get basic screen reader support2021-05-26
Developers can't tell what counts as a 'major' performance caveat; docs too thin2020-12-31
Performance degrades so badly with COVID data that it becomes unusable2020-12-30
Too hard to get working; author couldn't even get instancing running2020-09-09
Users may not find pixel details because the grid requires scrolling around the page2020-04-14
Page chugs on phone and feels awful to interact with2020-04-13
Getting WebGL and canvas working requires separate downloads, driver luck, or obsolete plugins2019-05-06
Getting started requires a large amount of boilerplate setup code2018-01-07
View jumps to a different area and toggles overlays unexpectedly after a few seconds2016-04-20
Changing scene presets in Internet Explorer makes memory climb until the browser must be killed2015-01-20
Big WebGL games take ten minutes to download assets before playing2014-03-18
Permission prompt appears on every page and clicking yes can hard-lock the machine2012-01-08
Lags when looking at a small block, same as the whole world2012-01-01
Scrolling the left text frame zooms the 3D view instead2011-11-17
Shows a blank page with no feedback while data loads2011-11-17
Mouse leaves the game window, making it hard to reach menu bar or taskbar2011-10-22
Mouse movements outside the game window trigger unintended system actions like sleep or browser chrome hiding2011-10-22
Demo runs so choppy in Chrome that the mouse becomes nearly unusable2011-07-16
Simulation runs slowly, around 45fps, on hardware that handles far heavier games2011-04-20
Page hangs after a while and makes the whole system unresponsive2011-04-15