Quite possibly the smallest WebGL demo effect. Micro Nova clocks under 512bytes and shows supernova-like blasting colors.
How did this happen ?
This started as a discussion with Daeken, discoverer of the PNG bootstraping technique, about the feasibility of a 512b WebGL intro. However with ~160 bytes for the bootstraping itself, the PNG approach was not the right one to hit the 512 bytes mark. The only way was some good old sweat, hand minification and hashing of verbose method names.
I started from the setup code of GL1k Cotton Candy, and trimmed down the HTML + CSS as much as possible, gained a couple of bytes on the JavaScript + WebGL setup, then it was time to squeeze a nice and tiny fragment shader in just over 100 bytes. And voila! The first 512 bytes WebGL effect.
Of course there has been many variants of the fragment shader before settling for Micro Nova. Some bringing us as far down as 507 bytes but the visuals were slightly less intereting.
Here is the breakdown of the various parts:
52 bytes of HTML + CSS
326 bytes of JavaScript
134 bytes of GLSL ( 44 and 105 for the vertex and fragment shader respectively. 15 bytes are shared between both shaders. )