[2] WebGL is fully integrated with other web standards, allowing GPU-accelerated usage of physics, image processing, and effects in the HTML canvas.

[11][12] In November 2012 Autodesk announced that they ported most of their applications to the cloud running on local WebGL clients.

It is a default backend for both Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox on Windows platforms and works by translating WebGL and OpenGL calls to available platform-specific APIs.

[17] ″[Google] Chrome uses ANGLE for all graphics rendering on Windows, including the accelerated Canvas2D implementation and the Native Client sandbox environment.″[17]

[18] More detailed information (like what renderer the browser uses, and what extensions are available) can be found at third-party websites.

[19][20] The low-level nature of the WebGL API, which provides little on its own to quickly create desirable 3D graphics, motivated the creation of higher-level libraries that abstract common operations (e.g. loading scene graphs and 3D objects in certain formats; applying linear transformations to shaders or view frustums).

Examples of libraries that provide high-level features include A-Frame (VR), BabylonJS, PlayCanvas, three.js, OSG.JS, Google’s model-viewer and CopperLicht.

[59][61] There are also some 2D libraries built atop WebGL, like Cocos2d-x or Pixi.js, which were implemented this way for performance reasons in a move that parallels what happened with the Starling Framework over Stage3D in the Flash world.

[62] Removing the rendering bottleneck by giving almost direct access to the GPU has exposed performance limitations in the JavaScript implementations.

In particular, Blend4Web allows a WebGL scene to be authored entirely in Blender and exported to a browser with a single click, even as a standalone web page.

Online platforms such as Sketchfab and Clara.io allow users to directly upload their 3D models and display them using a hosted WebGL viewer.