When launching in RTL languages, the WebGL canvas is always black. This doesn't happen for our 2D canvas rendering, and doesn't happen in LTR languages. Compare: http://google.com/maps?force=webgl&hl=ar (RTL, WebGL, bad) http://google.com/maps?force=webgl&hl=en (LTR, WebGL, looks good!) http://google.com/maps?force=canvas&hl=at (RTL, Canvas2D, good)
What operating system version are you running when you encounter this? Is it a shipping Mavericks version, or the developer seed for the upcoming OS?
I think this is a problem in your content. Switching the user agent to Google Chrome -- Mac makes it no longer happen. I see the map for a moment, then it smoothly fades to black. I'm not familiar with the inner workings of Google Maps. Do you have any idea what would cause this?
My OS: 10.9.4 Retina MBP GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M 1024 MB Alex, the initial map you see is image tags showing raster content. The WebGL context never shows content, it's always black.
Nightly version: Version 7.0.5 (9537.77.4, r171650)
Seems to be limited to Retina hardware.
A clue: In non-Safari high DPI browsers, we scale the canvas using style.width/style.height. If you emulate the Chrome UA, you'll see that it does render, but not with correct crisp text. In Safari, we scale using a webkit-transform of scale(.5, .5), which yields sharp text in LTR languages but a black canvas in RTL languages.
This is a bug in the maps code. We're not setting the origin of the transform in RTL languages.