Before we end this chapter, some mention should be made about the availability of WebGL and its similarities and differences to Stage3D in Adobe Flash. WebGL is a cross-platform web standard which allows developers to create and manipulate low-level 3D graphics, bringing plugin-free 3D development to the Web. WebGL can be implemented and viewed in all modern browsers, an exception is Internet Explorer.
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Take note that it seems Microsoft is planning to release Internet Explorer 11 with WebGL support.
The key aspects of WebGL and Stage 3D are that they both support the use of hardware acceleration. This can drastically increase the performance of graphical processing loads when viewing content on devices and browsers with proper support. Although this book doesn't contain the room to dive too deep into the use of WebGL, we will look at a couple of frameworks and libraries which support and use it in Chapter 6, HTML5 Frameworks and Libraries.