WebGL 2.0 support on Safari is still under development. In fact, it’s so new, that at the time of writing this article, the only browsers that support the standards are Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and the Opera browser. So in 2017, the specification for WebGL 2.0, which was based on OpenGL ES 3.0, was finally released.Īs we can see from the timeline, WebGL 2.0 is really fresh out the oven. WebGL 1.0, however, was still based on OpenGL ES 2.0. The latest version of OpenGL ES, version 3.0, was released in 2012 to keep up with the advancement in mobile GPU.
As graphics hardware becomes more capable, additional features get added to the graphical standards. To accommodate that, WebGL was created based on the OpenGL ES specification instead of the desktop-focused OpenGL. One thing noted, however, was that users could access web applications from both desktop and mobile devices, so WebGL needed to work on both platforms. In 2009, web applications became increasingly graphic-intensive, so a graphical standard called WebGL was introduced to help software developers. The same progression happened to web technology. And thus OpenGL ES (Embedded System) was branched out from OpenGL, and the initial version was released in the early 2000s. However, OpenGL is a standard primarily for desktop-class hardware, so they realized that they would need a different standard that could work with the limited capability of mobile hardware. When mobile phones with display screens were introduced, people realized that mobile technology also needed a standard for graphics computing. This standard is called OpenGL (which stands for Open Graphics Library). So, to mitigate this problem, a standard for graphics computing was introduced. Imagine having to write an app for each smartphone vendor separately it would cost many man hours. In the early 1990s, graphics intensive applications were expensive to create because the software had to be customized for each type of graphic processing hardware. To answer those questions, let’s go back in time a little bit. So, what is WebGL 2.0? How does it differ from the previous version of WebGL? What, in fact, is WebGL? By enabling WebGL 2.0 in their latest browser version, it seems both Google and Mozilla are confident that this bleeding edge web technology can finally be used by most users without any problems. While some of the previous versions of their browsers also have support for WebGL 2.0, those versions by default disable the WebGL 2.0 feature. Earlier this year, Google and Mozilla released a version of Chrome and Firefox that has full support for WebGL 2.0.
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