It would, but for the sake of backwards compatibility, these kinds of optimisations don't hurt Similarly, one reason I'm using canvas instead of WebGL is becau

It would, but for the sake of backwards compatibility, these kinds of optimisations don't hurt Similarly, one reason I'm using canvas instead of WebGL is because it's very easy to have hundreds of canvas elements on a page (for example when plotting hundreds of little barplots). WebGL, afaik, does not expect you to open more than one WebGL view, and requires some trickery to work around this. For example, this regl-in-idyll example opens one "transparent" WebGL overlay over the whole screen and "scrolls" along with the actual webpage: http://idyll-lang.org/idyll-regl-component/ http://idyll-lang.org/idyll-regl-component/ Which, admittedly, is a really cool hack! However, if you then take into account that my employees like to print their webpages, it turns into a pain again...