Mozilla Announces Deal to Bring Firefox Reality to HTC VIVE Devices

Re:Mozilla Announces Deal to Bring Firefox Reality to HTC VI... by mmastrac on Tuesday January 08, 2019 @02:16PM (#18858579)

Smart move on Mozilla's part to start working on VR. The desktop browser space has been saturated for so long, but making a bet on a new space might help them get a toehold on a whole new world.

This doesn't mean they are not focused on desktop, but strategically this is a solid bed that may or may not pay off, but will be key for long-term survival.

EDIT: plus having commercial sponsors for the eventual Servo-in-VR (as noted elsewhere, not shipping yet) will be key to getting Servo itself ready for production.

EDIT 2: Can we get material properties on HTML elements please? I want <img>s with bump-mapping and specular highlights. :)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Mozilla Announces Deal to Bring Firefox Reality to HTC VI... by sstangl on Tuesday January 08, 2019 @03:51PM (#18859546)

In particular, Firefox Reality is just a consumer of GeckoView.

Working on Firefox Reality has beneficial effects on Gecko's general ability to be embedded.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Mozilla Announces Deal to Bring Firefox Reality to HTC VI... by fabrice_d on Tuesday January 08, 2019 @07:31PM (#18861221)

Embedding in other Android apps is not really what we expect in general by being embeddable. Servo for instance is easy to embed since you just need to provide it a GL context and feed it events. This is far from being the case with Gecko unfortunately. Chromium is pretty good also especially with the Ozone layer.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Mozilla Announces Deal to Bring Firefox Reality to HTC VI... by floatboth on Tuesday January 08, 2019 @08:14PM (#18861448)

From what I've heard, it's not an Android-exclusive effort, and eventually Gecko will become embeddable again on desktop too. Camino Resurrection anyone? :)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Mozilla Announces Deal to Bring Firefox Reality to HTC VI... by earthscienceman on Tuesday January 08, 2019 @06:54PM (#18861007)

While you're correct in your assessment, and I hope this comes to fruition, this same paragraph could have been written about Firefox OS. That said, I'm not a detractor, I wish Firefox OS had also worked out. And I'm certainly very glad that Mozilla is still willing to approach new ideas and markets, even after getting burnt.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Mozilla Announces Deal to Bring Firefox Reality to HTC VI... by derf_ on Tuesday January 08, 2019 @08:20PM (#18861491)

The Firefox Reality team is much smaller than the FirefoxOS team was (i.e., by more than an order of magnitude).

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Mozilla Announces Deal to Bring Firefox Reality to HTC VI... by fabrice_d on Tuesday January 08, 2019 @07:32PM (#18861234)

The FirefoxOS legacy is alive in KaiOS which has 50M+ users now and is growing. Indeed a very poor decision from Mozilla's leadership to kill the effort too soon.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Mozilla Announces Deal to Bring Firefox Reality to HTC VI... by kdf83 on Tuesday January 08, 2019 @10:17PM (#18861981)

I have KaiOS on a Nokia phone that I intended to use for email and 4g hotspot. I didn't expect much but it literally a POS, super slow, impossible to customize (i.e. hotspot quick launch), and no apps in the marketplace. It would be more usable with a pre symbian OS in my opinion. People that rave about KaiOS I figure are like that those that endless recommend SICP or 'Clean Code' as the book of gods and probably never read it.

[ Parent | on HN ]