Firefox Gets Better Video Gaming and Warns of Non-Secure Websites

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/01/24/gets-better-video-gaming-non-secure-web-warning/

by kungfudoi • 9 years ago

175 44 9 years ago

blog.mozilla.org

aorth• 9 years ago

The WebGL demo "After the Flood" linked in the post is really beautiful. I don't play games but this technology is very impressive. Try it for yourself if you're on an updated Firefox (51+):

https://playcanv.as/e/p/44MRmJRU/

ndrake• 9 years ago

This keeps crashing Firefox for me when I try it on a Mac

cpeterso• 9 years ago

Can you share a link to a Firefox crash report from your about:crashes page? Does the site crash when loading or after you start playing the demo?

You might be seeing the following GeForceGLDriver crash:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1333534

ArlenBales2• 9 years ago

What year and model is your Mac?

Twirrim2• 9 years ago

Mine just pans the view upwards. Nothing I do on the trackpad will get it to recentre. It's a very beautiful view of the sky I get :D

51.0, MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Early 2015.)

flukus• 9 years ago

Build once, test everywhere!

pjmlp• 9 years ago

Same here on Windows 10 with a GT 240M, using DX 10.1 and OpenGL 3.3 drivers.

ArlenBales2• 9 years ago

Works for me also on Chrome 56 beta on Ubuntu 16.04 and a GeForce GT 640 (Driver 367.57)

http://caniuse.com/#feat=webgl2

ferongr• 9 years ago

Is it? I mean, it's nice that it can be played "in the browser" but from a graphics fidelity perspective (and artistic direction, but that's beside the point) it's not impressive. It looks like 6-7 year old game graphics, without the interactivity and complexity.

mixedCase• 9 years ago

I don't know why you were downvoted. This demo doesn't feel more impressive than the 13 year old Half Life 2, let alone the 10 year old Crysis. Both interactive games rather than a tech demo.

badsectoracula• 9 years ago

Well, i think the clouds are procedural and you get soft edges in the water. But yeah, i like the scene but the performance is abysmal (45 FPS on "Ultra" on my GTX980 for a scene that generally looks emptier and more repeat-y than what you see when you exit Half-Life 2's metro station).

I'm not sure if it is because of WebGL 2, Firefox, the PlayCanvas engine or just this demo though. But unless WebGL 2 imposes big performance penalties, i doubt this is representative of what could be done.

akjainaj• 9 years ago

And what's even worse, so many drivers have issues when compiling shaders that were writen maliciously (or even regular ones), that I'd say we'll see security problems with this really soon, the same we saw them when web fonts started to pop in and code that dealt with fonts simply wasn't written with security in mind

mattdesl2• 9 years ago

It's a combination of problems but IMHO mostly due to things like: lack of tooling, immaturity of graphics libraries and especially immaturity of WebGL2 in those libraries, and modelling/art direction.

The technology is pretty capable but the ecosystem around it pales in comparison to the platforms driving many of today's AAA and indie games.

mattdesl2• 9 years ago

WebGL2 brings a few nice features but a lot of the cool stuff is already possible in current WebGL across most browsers.

Here's another WebGL2 demo I had the opportunity to work on — the WebGL 1 version looks pretty similar. :)

http://www.jam3.com/work/#mozilla-webgl

cJ0th4• 9 years ago

I just upgraded to FF 51 on debian from mozilla.debian.org and when I click your link I get this message: "This demo requires WebGL 2.0 support. Please update to the latest version of Mozilla Firefox."

bzbarsky5• 9 years ago

Just to check, what is the "webgl.enable-webgl2" preference set to in your Debian Firefox? You can use about:config to check this.

Latty• 9 years ago

"I don't play games" is such a weird comment to me, just like "I don't read books" or "I don't watch TV" - writing off an entire medium seems rash. (Even if you are just stating you don't, rather than you wouldn't - the fact you identify yourself as not doing so presumably means you are not going to try some of the great works out there).

Although, to be fair, I guess "I don't read poetry".

lightedman4• 9 years ago

So for fun I decided to break out an old program I was working on to see if they fixed some of the major issues that plagued performance in FireFox.

Nope. 2D application and still can't get over 20FPS in Firefox (meanwhile, Chrome and Edge get a solid 60 FPS, in spite of their own quirks.)

Looks like they skipped fixing their WebGL 1 issues.

potch• 9 years ago

Have a public URL? Would love to add it to a test suite to help find pathological performance cases.

lightedman4• 9 years ago

You can load any game written in BYOND in FireFox and have the performance issues show almost immediately.

But it's especially egregious in mine and I don't know why, as I've done almost nothing besides add a few basic extensions to the base engine to create a somewhat-usable 2D Second Life-esque platform (with far more expansion capability) and FF just dogs on it. Space Station 13 REALLY makes the problems stand out.

codr4life• 9 years ago

Dear God, please kill me now; I can't take any more of this bullshit. How about actually improving the software instead of piling more marketing bling on top?

Caspy72• 9 years ago

What they really need are multiple developers working on multiple teams working on multiple projects.

jbmorgado• 9 years ago

Hum, you could argue that what they actually need is a sane road map for the project that allocates the devs they have in what the Firefox browser is actually lacking: better performance, memory management and bug fixing.

ivthreadp1103• 9 years ago

I tried opening the link "if you have 51 installed link" on my Samsung C13 chrome book and it crashed it in a strange way. Yes I am aware it's running chrome, but was curious what would happen.

I have it running in developer mode in the beta channel. I'm going to try it again to see if it crashes it again.

ivthreadp1103• 9 years ago

Tried it again after rebooting and it ran fine (choppy in high def mode- not surprising given the hardware specs of this computer).

I must of had to much stuff open before or something. In otherwords- unable to reproduce strange crash.

ivthreadp1103• 9 years ago

Only wish invert y-axis was in settings... I may be old school but can't do first person views when moving up makes you look up. Gotta invert the axis for me to be able to play around without messing me up.

dingo_bat• 9 years ago

Are there any worthwhile games that use Web gl? It seems to me we had better Web games when flash and new grounds were cool.

hkmurakami• 9 years ago

Those flash games were great. They would definitely go viral even back then, through AIM/MSN chats.

And it seems like more than a few people made good money porting them to iOS/Android.

Firefox Gets Better Video Gaming and Warns of Non-Secure Websites

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