[Elysian893]

Because the WebOS isn't OpenGL. It's not a graphics language, so it will take about 10X the amount of processing power to do the same calculations. It's quite slow and shouldn't be used for Graphic animations/resizing.

I don't see how WebOS will stay with the current presentation. It would work much better if it migrated to a WebGL or Flash app. But we are several month from that technology being available and even longer for them to rewrite some of the functionality. I doubt we'll see it on the Pre or Pixie. Maybe WebOS 2.0 sometime next year or later.

October is only next month, thats when Adobe is promising Flash...

[Mike S]

and isn't WebGL starting to trickle out?

[GregV]

I seem to recall someone saying there wasn't even an OpenGL driver in the Linux underlying webOS, which means all the zooming, animation, and compositing for shadows and anti-aliasing are done in software. This is why animations aren't as smooth as on the iPhone, and it probably causes webOS to eat more battery and run apps slower than it should as the main CPU has to do all the graphics work on top of running the apps and OS.

It's a shame to waste the chip's 3D capabilities like that, but I'm sure they're working on it. You'll probably see 3D support for full screen apps at some point (like how they support video playback now) and maybe in a window via the browser plugin architecture (which is how they do Classic behind the scenes.)

Hopefully at some point down the road they'll be able to integrate it into WebKit's display engine overall. Animation smoothness, battery life, and app speed should all benefit from offloading some of the graphics processing. However, I don't know anything about WebKit's internals so I don't know how easy or difficult this will be. If the desktop versions have support for this kind of stuff already it should come quickly. If not, they'll have to delve deep into the engine to pull it off, which will be labor intensive. Or they could go for a hack approach and do it as extensions for certain operations to be invoked by the OS explicitly, which won't give you 100% of the possible benefit but should be enough to be worthwhile.

[burnsie28]

The pixie is slower, its already been stated.