> If that corner-of-the-window GUI object is thrashed several hundred times in a millisecond, it would cause the GPU driver on my specific machine to lock up, for a reason I've never root-caused.
Until comparatively recently, it was absurdly easy to crash machines via their graphics drivers, even by accident. And I bet a lot of them were security concerns, not just DoS vectors. WebGL has been marvellous at encouraging the makers to finally fix their drivers properly, because browsers declared that kind of thing unacceptable (you shouldn’t be able to bring the computer down from an unprivileged web page¹), and developed long blacklists of cards and drivers, and brought the methodical approach browsers had finally settled on to the graphics space.
Things aren’t perfect, but they are much better than ten years ago.
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¹ Ah, fond memories of easy IE6 crashes, some of which would even BSOD Windows 98. My favourite was, if my memory serves me correctly, <script>document.createElement("table").appendChild(document.createElement("div"))</script>. This stuff was not robust.
Until comparatively recently, it was absurdly easy to crash machines via their graphics drivers, even by accident. And I bet a lot of them were security concerns, not just DoS vectors. WebGL has been marvellous at encouraging the makers to finally fix their drivers properly, because browsers declared that kind of thing unacceptable (you shouldn’t be able to bring the computer down from an unprivileged web page¹), and developed long blacklists of cards and drivers, and brought the methodical approach browsers had finally settled on to the graphics space.
Things aren’t perfect, but they are much better than ten years ago.
—⁂—
¹ Ah, fond memories of easy IE6 crashes, some of which would even BSOD Windows 98. My favourite was, if my memory serves me correctly, <script>document.createElement("table").appendChild(document.createElement("div"))</script>. This stuff was not robust.