WebGL Overview

OpenGL ES for the Web

WebGL is a cross-platform, royalty-free web standard for a low-level 3D graphics API based on OpenGL ES, exposed to ECMAScript via the HTML5 Canvas element. Developers familiar with OpenGL ES 2.0 will recognize WebGL as a Shader-based API using GLSL, with constructs that are semantically similar to those of the underlying OpenGL ES API. It stays very close to the OpenGL ES specification, with some concessions made for what developers expect out of memory-managed languages such as JavaScript. WebGL 1.0 exposes the OpenGL ES 2.0 feature set; WebGL 2.0 exposes the OpenGL ES 3.0 API.

WebGL brings plugin-free 3D to the web, implemented right into the browser. Major browser vendors Apple (Safari), Google (Chrome), Microsoft (Edge), and Mozilla (Firefox) are members of the WebGL Working Group.