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Comment by _nedR | Hacker News Reader

What are the applications of WebGL?

If you are doing a game or a 3d application on browsers- WebGL would be the way to go obviously. But apart from that, where could it be used? Could websites and web applications benefit from using WebGL? If so, in what way? Would it improve or worsen battery performance?

ps: Sorry for all the noob questions but i am genuinely curious about the implications of WebGL.

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Currently it is a no go if you plan to target mobile devices.

Only the latest version of iOS supports it, on Android it is a joke with Chrome blacklisting many handsets[0] and Windows Phone only partially supports it.

[0] You can re-enable it via developer flags, but no normal user is going to know about it.

A minority of drivers/GPUs are blacklisted on desktop, and you have to deal with less than 100% WebGL coverage in any case. But yeah on mobile it's a sharper "reasonably recent devices only" division.

You can see (somewhat skewed) stats on http://webglstats.com/

Interestingly iOS is ahead of Android in tablets, but behind on phones.

Be careful to interpret the stats there correctly. Eg when you leave just the specific category checkmarked, the graph shows ios-smartphone webgl support rate at 79% and android-smartphone rate at 75%. The percentages in the sidebar are just browser shares and not WebGL support rates.

If you do anything graphical, be it 2D or 3D, you can use WebGL or Canvas2D (for 2D-only). For some domains it's enough to do redraw/render only if a mouse/touch-events fires which helps a lot with the battery performance.

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