Mozilla Plans To Build Virtual Reality APIs Into Firefox By the End of 2015

An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla's VR research team is hard at work making virtual reality native to the web. The group wants more than a few experimental VR-only websites, they want responsive VR websites that can adapt seamlessly between VR and non-VR, from mobile to desktop, built with HTML and CSS . Experimental work is already underway, and now the team says that they 'aim to have support for the WebVR API shipping with our release channel builds of Firefox Desktop by end of this year.' Those with the Oculus Rift developer kit can already try out a few native WebVR experiences using Firefox Nightly.

Comments

Return of VRML?

[Frobnicator]

Reading the article, it looks very much like the promises of VRML back in 1994.

Re:Return of VRML?

[future assassin]

There were some pretty cool VRML websites in the late 90's which you could view/interact with using Cosmo player plugin. Didn't really require too much of CPU as I was watching them on a Pentium 2

And the Firefox bloat continues to swell

[QuietLagoon]

The Firefox market share continues to drop as Mozilla continues to add bloat to what once was an excellent browser.

.
One would think that Mozilla would take a step back and think, what might we be doing wrong?.

But no. Mozilla, instead, accelerates the rate of bloating.

Re:And the Firefox bloat continues to swell

[gstoddart]

Yeah, no kidding. I have no interest in a VR website. I don't want VR website.

I read this and I think "just who the hell is asking for this feature".

I want a web browser. If Mozilla wants to create a VR client, go right ahead. But this doesn't need to become bloat in the browser for the overwhelming majority of people who want to use Firefox.

This sounds like a feature nobody actually gives a damn about.

Mozilla, what happened to a lean, standards compliant, privacy focused browser?

Re:And the Firefox bloat continues to swell

[_xeno_]

Firefox is multithreaded. Apparently it's using 86 threads right now as I type this.

I haven't a clue what those threads are doing since nearly everything clearly takes place in the UI thread given the number of times the browser freezes to deal with JavaScript, but - it's got a whole lot of threads for some reason.

Re:And the Firefox bloat continues to swell

[JMJimmy]

I don't trust Mozilla for a second but Chrome's idea of privacy is to pretend it doesn't exist... even if you block everything you can Chrome still has the ability to send data back as part of its core functionality. To my knowledge they haven't exploited this yet but it's only a matter of time.

Meanwhile, Firefox 38.0.5 included even more bloat

[NotInHere]

The recent release of firefox 38.0.5 on june 2 has been below the radar of many news sites, including Slashdot, because it was only a "patch" release.

However, 38.0.5 included real feature changes, meaning the inclusion of a proprietary web service. I not just hate that firefox added a proprietary web service prominently to its browser, also they smuggled this in in a patch release, avoiding press attention.

Firefox isn't a randy bitch dog that every dog inside the SV startup neighbourhood springs on, its a major web browser which respects its users. At least it was until 38.0.5.

I accepted that they added the social API, I understood their EME changes, I've thought firefox hello was a good addition. But for 38.0.5 pocket integration, I'm heavily disappointed by mozilla.

This is what extensions are for

[MobyDisk]

This is what extensions and forks are for. Stop adding this into the core browser. I just upgraded to FF 38.0.5 today and I spent the morning reading pop-ups arrows pointing to features I don't want. The most recent one, "Pocket", requires me to sign-up for some 3rd-party service. So basically, someone wanted to advertise their product and they probably paid the Mozilla Foundation to get it added in.

Oh look, there's a bug request to have it removed.

Re:This is what extensions are for

[JohnFen]

Yes, because monetization is inherently antagonistic to users. That should be no surprise. If the problem is money, then perhaps Mozilla would want to consider a less painful and more honest form of monetization: start charging for the browser.

But the main problem with Pocket isn't the monetization. It's that Mozilla is selling out the privacy of its users. Adding insult to injury, it's selling to a commercial, third party company with a blatantly awful privacy policy.

To bring things back around to the topic, though, this is not the problem with the idea of integrating VR. That problem (which Pocket shares) is that Mozilla is intent on spending their purportedly limited resources on adding features of limited value instead of fixing the numerous problems that have been introduced into Firefox over the last several years.

But what do the users want?

[ShaunC]

Mozilla's VR research team is hard at work making virtual reality native to the web. The group wants more than a few experimental VR-only websites, they want responsive VR websites that can adapt seamlessly between VR and non-VR, from mobile to desktop, built with HTML and CSS .

I'm not really concerned with what Mozilla's VR research team wants, I want to know why Mozilla doesn't care what their users want. I want to know why the slick, responsive, optionally extensible browser with a low memory footprint that millions of people switched to because it was a slick, responsive, optionally extensible browser with a low memory footprint has turned into a bloated behemoth that now includes such essentials as a built-in video chat client. The list of things I have to manually disable on a fresh Firefox install is bordering on inexcusable these days. Just filtering on about:config for enabled, there are 24 options I've changed from their defaults.

If I wanted Firefox to be my fucking operating system, I would buy a device that runs Firefox OS. I don't, and I haven't. I, as a user, want a browser.

Mozilla's continued race to become Chrome makes me question more and more with each Firefox update why I don't just give in and run Chrome itself. At this point I really have to wonder if the Firefox project isn't being intentionally torpedoed by some Google plants on Mozilla's payroll. There seem to be few explanations left.

Looking Forward to More Bloat

[hduff]

Maybe now they can include about:kitchensink