One workaround is to "mirror" the images: send the url of each texture image to your own server and download it back again. This does funnel a potentially large amount of traffic through a small number of machines though and loads the image from a new IP.
Why on earth is this stuff in browser in the first place? Just so that a tiny handful of web pages can show GL demos? It's just crazy to include all this functionality in mainstream browsers.
A large part of people is using the web for (casual MMO) gaming. 3D gaming is very popular and attracts users. Currently this involves hacks using clunky applets (such as java3d). With WebGL, this will be a thing of the past.
3D in the browser has been tried before with VRML, which failed. One of the reasons for failing was that is was too high-level. Most game devs want to use low-level APIs such as OpenGL. Hence I think WebGL will be huge success.
It won't be a success until Local Storage isn't limited to 5MB. Right now there's no way to "install" your game into a browser, which cripples WebGL's ability to be a serious alternative to traditional PC-based gaming / mobile gaming.
A single uncompressed 1024x1024 RGBA texture is 4MB, for example.
(I say all this not to be negative, but rather in hopes that the correct developers will hear the plea from the indie game industry: enhance Local Storage. We want to build games on your WebGL platform, but we can't until you do.)
There are probably some other practical issues left to be resolved as well before the browser is a mature cross-platform 3D gaming platform. But I can certainly see things going that way.
I'm in the process of making a WebGL game - and oh yes, local storage is a minor concern. Random slow downs, browser freezing, audio syncing, and randomly incompatible hardware are only some of the problems I've been facing.
A paper-thin wrapper around OpenGL is what the game-devs want. They don't want to be straight-jacketed into one game or rendering engine.
Also, OpenGL isn't that low-level anymore. It is the API that the GPU speaks, and with recent developments the client can be much less 'chatty'. Do as much as possible from shaders and on the GPU itself. We've gone far beyond "do a call per vertex".
As for hope, yes I have more "faith" in Google/Mozilla to improve cross-platform javascript performance and memory issues than I have in Oracle or Adobe to improve theirs.
I think it's important that WebGL gets pushed to the browser. Getting a stable 3D environment is super important for application development and obviously games.
Imagine if I could write one app that worked on an iOS, Android, Linux, OSX, Windows. I may need to do a bit of working around browser bugs, but in the end I only have that one program. Don't just think this will be limited to online apps, thanks you html5 storage we can actually store html applications to the phone.
