At the Game Developers Conference in San Fransisco yesterday, the Khronos Group released the official royalty-free version 1.0 of the WebGL specs, alongside free tools to assist in the testing and development of WebGL applications.
WebGL is an open standard made to support 3D graphics directly inside of web browsers, without any plugins. All the browser needs is full HTML 5 support, while WebGL requires OpenGL ES 2.0 support in the hardware, a very widespread driver these days.
[important]At the time of writing, Google Chrome 9.0 is the only browser that supports WebGL in a stable implementation. Firefox, Opera and Safari browsers should all be available with WebGL 1.0 support in their stable versions soon. In the meantime, currently available beta versions already implement support for WebGL.[/important]
In their official press release, Khronos tries to explain how WebGL works and why it should become the standard for 3D inside browsers: “WebGL defines a JavaScript binding to OpenGL® ES 2.0 to allow rich 3D graphics within a browser on any platform supporting the industry-standard OpenGL or OpenGL ES graphics APIs.”
Not quite there yet!