[duckfruit]

But if all you want to do is render HTML then why use <canvas>?

I'm only speculating, but it doesn't seem surprising that regular DOM rendering logic - which has to handle approximately a bazillion different rules and special cases - is slower than a custom renderer written for a specific subset of HTML.

[hwillis]

If you want to do any kind of text or diegetic UI in webgl, you are begging for DOM rendering to canvas (which is then sent to a texture)