
Mozilla Games Technology Roadmap - AndrewDucker
https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2015/07/02/mozilla-games-technology-roadmap/
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greggman
Can we please not restrict APIs to https only ? My game system requires http
because it serves pages from your home computer/console to your phone's
browser on the local network

[http://docs.happyfuntimes.net](http://docs.happyfuntimes.net)

Either that or please suggest a viable workaround

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the8472
I think the "new APIs only on https" plan has exceptions for lan-local
addresses or at least for localhost.

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hobarrera
What if my home computer has a public IP address (which it does, since I use
IPv6 only)? It's not always so simple.

There's also the option of my phone connecting to my home pc while it uses 4G
(while the PC uses the land connection).

~~~
the8472
then just white-list those addresses?

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the8472
> Improve browser storage capabilities.

I wonder why local storage even is a thing.

It doesn't interface nicely with facilities provided by host OS.

Providing file IO to a fenced-off, per-origin part of the filesystem would
allow people to roll their own data serialization and allow users and desktop
applications to drop in/pull out files as they desire.

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cromwellian
I wonder what they mean by scalable source maps? The last time they proposed
an alternative to source maps they basically proposed shipping down an AST
structure which was even larger. Current source maps already tax the debugger
for large programs, so much so that for GWT we had to implement optimizations
in the source map generator to avoid generating nodes that are not helpful for
debugging but which cause bloat.

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james33
This all sounds great, but I didn't see anything about simple HTML5 Canvas
performance. Firefox is in dead last when it comes to the 2d rendering
performance. I can run our HTML5 games at a smooth 60 FPS on Chrome, Safari,
Opera and IE, but only get 10-15 FPS on Firefox on the same computer.

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sonnyp
it's probably a bug, you should report it along with OS and hardware details

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james33
It is not related to a specific platform, we've tested on many different
computers and operating systems. We also get reports from users all the time
saying the game is barely playable on Firefox but works great on any other
browser they use.

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cpeterso
Is this a particular GoldFire game? Can you share a link?

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james33
Yes, it is [http://casinorpg.com](http://casinorpg.com) (the rest of our games
don't use canvas).

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bzbarsky
Hey, I've been trying to look into this a bit. Which OS (or OSes?) do you see
10-15fps on? Because so far on Mac I'm not seeing any differences compared to
Chrome, but I may just be missing it...

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james33
My main OS is OS X and this is where I've done the most testing, but we see
similar performance degradation on Windows as well. We've tested on multiple
Macs and Windows machines. It is almost as if no hardware acceleration is
being used.

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fenomas
Side question, but is there a way to package content with Firefox as a desktop
app (like node-webkit/nwjs does with Chromium)?

Seems to me that one nice feature for HTML gaming is the ability to deploy a
paid version to Steam/GOG/etc..

~~~
fbender
Yes, it's part of the OpenWebApps[1] initative. As far as I know, however,
there's no standard way to package them up with the runtime for shipping[2],
except for XUL Runner (which does not target OpenWebApps). For Android,
there's an APK packager[3][4].

[1] [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/Apps/Quickstart/Build/In...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/Apps/Quickstart/Build/Intro_to_open_web_apps) [2] There's none for
Webkit/Chromium either, as nwjs/atom-shell are third-party projects. [3]
[https://developer.mozilla.org/de/Marketplace/Options/Open_we...](https://developer.mozilla.org/de/Marketplace/Options/Open_web_apps_for_android)
[4] [https://github.com/mozilla/apk-factory-
service](https://github.com/mozilla/apk-factory-service)

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falcor84
This is wonderful news. When this takes hold (and assuming the driver
situation improves), I'll be able to finally get rid of my home Windows game
machine in favor of GNU/Linux.

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Animats
WebAssembly? We got rid of Flash for that?

Also, is there really that much demand for games in the browser? If you'd like
to see a few thousand bad ones, go to "newgrounds.com".

~~~
CyberDildonics
I hope not everyone is this short sited.

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rockdoe
What are the plans for shipping 64 bit Firefox? I see they have Nightlies, but
what about release?

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cpeterso
64-bit Firefox is available in the Beta channel. It may "soft launch" in
Firefox 40, but some features are still incomplete (like NPAPI plugin
support).

[https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/win64](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/win64)

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karmakaze
I thought 'Games' was a verb and thought how does one game a roadmap?

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ganessh
This is awesome :)

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AndrewDucker
One of the things Mozilla could do is to make Flash run better.

My wife prefers Chrome to Firefox purely because Flash tends to stutter more
on Firefox, and she plays a lot of Facebook games.

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pervycreeper
The whole point is to replace Flash with a better alternative.

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cousin_it
I wish that alternative was confined to a plugin running in a rectangle on the
page. Otherwise game theory incentives make every site add a megabyte of
JavaScript to every article, and stop you from reading unless you load the
whole megabyte.

~~~
fbender
That's happening today (just check the "big" news sites) just as it happened
before with Flash-based sites.

But that is just bad habit of programmers, not the issue with the technology
per se.

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socialist_coder
It's disappointing to me that it's 2015 and we have yet to have a good
solution for browser games. Flash is _still_ your best choice by a huge
margin.

4 years ago I was very bullish on HTML5. Flash was dying, HTML5 was the
future! It was right around the corner! I think a lot of people agreed with
me.

4 years later - what has changed? Decent webGL support but still driven by a
terribly slow javascript runtime. ASM.js gets us halfway there but it's
brittle and does't even run in Chrome so it's basically worthless for anything
that isn't a tech demo. The audio API is also still very limited.

We've been trying to port our Unity mobile app to webGL for 6 months now and
it's been nothing but pain. In hindsight, it was a mistake. I was bullish on
HTML5 back in 2011 and I was bullish on webGL in 2014. I was wrong, again.

So, I'd like to have faith in these efforts, but as they say, "Fool me once,
shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."

~~~
higherpurpose
We'll probably have to wait a few more years until Webassembly and the easier
to use and faster Vulkan API comes to the browser as well.

I know they've been working on WebGL 2 (OpenGL ES 3.0-based) for a while, but
if it doesn't ship within a year, they might as well scrap it in favor of a
Vulkan-based API.

~~~
bobajeff
I don't know. WebAssembly MVP could be here fairly soon as it's largly built
as an extension to JavaScript engines.

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mrec
And I believe it's relatively trivial to polyfill wasm support by converting
it to asm.js.

