Firefox 22 Released, Boosts 3-D Gaming and Video Calls

Today Mozilla announced the launch of Firefox 22 for desktops and Android devices. For the desktop version, WebRTC, the open source browser-based communications API, is now enabled by default. "This technology makes it possible to place and receive video calls from a mobile or desktop browser or share live video, files and images with friends and family." Firefox 22 also has support for the asm.js subset of JavaScript, which allows for big performance boosts on graphically complex applications in the browser. (We saw a demonstration of this a while back.) Other new features include display scaling options for making text bigger on high-res displays, better WebGL rendering performance, word wrapping for text files displayed in the browser, and the ability to change the playback rate of HTML5 audio and video. The new Android version features include tablet UI support for smaller tablets, and a fix for scrolling in nested frames.

Comments

Re:Boosts 3-D Gaming and Video Calls

[h4rr4r]

No, I do remember phoenix being that way though.

It handles the flying periodic table better

[sasparillascott]

Not perfect, but better... http://mrdoob.github.io/three.js/examples/css3d_periodictable.html

Re:I want a car, no I want a plane...

[washort]

"to browse" is a pretty vague term. This is equivalent to saying 30 years ago "I don't know all use cases, but I personally use my computer to compute. Why do I want 3D gaming and video conferencing integrated into it? What next, reading the news?"

The web browser is now a universal secure applications platform, standards-based, not controlled by a single owner. These are compelling reasons for people to want features added to it to compete with other applications platforms.

Re:Boosts 3D Gaming and video calls?

[Cyko_01]

FYI: google chrome has this same "bloat" in development and stable builds as well as true bloat like NaCl - a brand new interpreted language on top of javascript that no one uses