WebGL, a technology that will add hardware-accelerated 3D graphics capabilities to web sites and web browsers, is starting to pick up steam and is already seeing early experimental adoption in some of the major browsers. The Webkit HTML engine was the first to introduce support for WebGL almost a month ago followed shortly by Mozilla. The technology has now made its way into the latest releases of Google's Chrome browsers though it isn't enabled by default.

“Preliminary WebGL support is now being compiled into Chrome; see http://crbug.com/21852 and http://codereview.chromium.org/270003. The spec is still evolving, and there's a higher-than-average chance that upstream WebKit changes might break the build. If you see any build failures related to GraphicsContext3D, Canvas*Array, etc. during a WebKit roll, please don't hesitate to turn ENABLE_3D_CANVAS back to 0 in src/build/features_override.gypi, and I'll fix it,” Kenneth Russell wrote in a Chrome mailing list on Google Groups.

The technology has been in the making for several years, starting out at Mozilla as Canvas 3D and evolving into WebGL under the supervision of the Khronos Group, an organization backed by some of the heavy players in the hardware and software industry, responsible for the OpenGL graphics standard. However, it was only recently that development of both the standard and the implementations ramped up, with an announcement last summer and gradual rollout in the major browsers very recently.

WebGL first showed up in nightly builds of the Webkit open-source HTML rendering engine powering a multitude of desktop and mobile web browsers including Safari and Google Chrome. The extension wasn't enabled by default but with preliminary support there it was only a matter of time until it trickled down to the developer builds of Chrome, which are based on the freshest builds of the components that make up the browser. Now Chrome developers can test WebGL by running the latest Chrome builds with the "--enable-webgl" and "--no-sandbox" command-line switches. Mozilla also added support for WebGL in the latest nightly builds of Firefox 3.7.