
Mozilla Announces Deal to Bring Firefox Reality to HTC VIVE Devices - Vinnl
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/01/08/mozilla-announces-deal-to-bring-firefox-reality-to-htc-vive-devices/
======
WhatIsDukkha
(this announcement is most likely about mobile vr headsets, not the PC side)

I'm pleased about this because -

1- Firefox Reality is actually "Servo" ie the Rust based browser Mozilla has
been developing for years. edit - UGGGH this may not ship with Servo enabled
:(

2- This is a stamp of approval from both Firefox and HTC that Servo is ready
for consumers at least for this use case (which is very demanding low latency
graphics!)

3- Actual Firefox means far higher standards of privacy and integrity then
some cancerous Chromium embedded scenario.

I'm concerned enough to think twice about buying anything from Vive mobile
because -

1- Their Vive PC software is awful shovelware.

2- It's not clear what the OS environment around the browser would be in an
HTC branded mobile headset. If it's a clean version of Android that can be
hacked on and replaced then we have something.

3- WebXR/WebVR still has no useful way to actually browse the real web, there
is no "HTMLTexture" to allow you to say even look at Wikipedia through a
portal. As a result you are trapped in basically WebXR Demo hell...

~~~
larsberg
Firefox Reality is the brand we're using for the suite of browser products
across VR and AR devices.

Today, Firefox Reality is available for standalone VR devices (like the HTC
Vive Focus) and is a native Java application that talks to the GeckoView
library, which is made up of components from the mobile version of Gecko, the
Firefox web engine.

Firefox Reality for desktop will similarly be based off of the Firefox Desktop
product pieces.

Note that there's a bunch of "Servo inside" \- from small Rust components to
the Quantum work including the new CSS style system to the forthcoming
WebRender component.

I don't have anything to announce today about a Firefox Reality-branded
browser based on top of Servo.

~~~
jillesvangurp
Probably worth mentioning, Firefox VR is also going targeting Magic Leap:
[https://blog.mozvr.com/a-new-browser-for-magic-
leap/](https://blog.mozvr.com/a-new-browser-for-magic-leap/)

IMHO the strategy of unlocking a lot of VR and AR content via a browser makes
a lot of sense. The ongoing Rustification of Firefox, things like Web GL,
WASM, etc. It all makes sense for VR/AR applications to build on that. Solving
the empty room problem where there is no meaningful content or where all the
interesting content is in somebody else's walled garden is a key challenge.

VR requires a dedicated UX and I can imagine independent hardware vendors are
maybe not so eager to e.g. rely on Google for providing them with that UX.
Also, Firefox seems to be leading here rather than following.

~~~
avaer
Shameless plug, but for WebXR on Magic Leap github.com/webmixedreality/exokit
has been the go-to for a while.

I wrote it because I found browsers too slow to move on features like html to
texture (powered by webrender) and multi-site blending, which become quite
manageable if the browser core is written in JavaScript.

------
mmastrac
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. :)

~~~
earthscienceman
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.

~~~
fabrice_d
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.

~~~
kdf83
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.

------
loa-in-backup
Firefox from what I gathered will be used as the de facto browser in in-VR web
browsing. If you read the VIVE promotion article on VIVE homepage you'd know
that they are planning a kind of VR metaverse as an interface to the games you
play - instead of picking an option from a flat surface you'll "walk" into the
app/game. But of course this doesn't change the facts that web is flat so any
in-app or in-game web will be displayed in some fashion using the Firefox
Reality engine.

~~~
Animats
Second Life has browsers in-world, and they're Chrome subprocesses. These
allow you to put any web page on a surface in the 3D world.

Doing a "VR metaverse" is a big job. There are about a half dozen of them now,
and they all have tiny user counts.

------
tln
Cool, going to try this on my Daydream setup right now.

Chrome on Daydream presents a super simplified UI. I'd love to be able to open
a few tabs, move them around spatially, adjust the size, etc.

There is so much potential for improving browsing experiences in VR.

~~~
Fej
What device are you using? I'm using a Pixel 2 XL and had to sideload it
because the Play Store shows it as incompatible. It is broken, though, can't
type more than one letter. There's a ton of promise though. I haven't found a
_good_ VR browser yet.

Somewhat considering actually working on the project, I know they're on Github
but don't know if they are looking for help.

~~~
tln
Pixel 2 XL also

What else have you tried?

~~~
Fej
Just that. It appears that they are not supporting Daydream View or Google
Cardboard headsets at this time. Just standalone VR devices.

------
konschubert
I don’t know. They maybe hope they’ll be first on the next big thing which
they think is VR. But who knows if VR is going to be big, who knows if it
needs a browser and what keeps chrome from eating the cake anyways after
Firefox has scoped out the territory.

I think this is a very risky bet unless they make net money on this which they
can funnel into more promising projects.

~~~
Vinnl
You and I have very different definitions of risky :)

Worst case, the effort of a relatively small team has been wasted, and Gecko
and Servo will have received a few improvements as a result of their work.
Best case, VR makes it big and Firefox is its go-to browser.

Then consider the case where they're not in the VR space early. Best case,
they've saved a relatively small team's effort. Worst case, VR makes it big
and Firefox is as marginally relevant as it is now on mobile.

~~~
konschubert
I don’t believe that being early as a browser gives you that much of an
advantage in such an unexplored space. Differences between browsers in this
space will be big for a while and people will switch back and forth.

Maybe the cost of this project for Mozilla is so small that it doesn’t matter,
but I think it isn’t

Edit: also I said that the bet itself is risky, not that it’s putting
Mozilla’s existence in jeopardy

------
bluescrn
Is this going to be a text-free browser?

Trying to display/read small text in VR really shows up the limitations of
current tech.

------
Vinnl
Not quite sure what this means - is Firefox Reality going to be the default
browser on the VIVE?

~~~
metajack
Yes. It will be the pre-installed default browser on Vive devices.

~~~
jniedrauer
I still don't understand what this means. It's like saying Firefox will be the
default browser of Dell monitors. The HTC Vive is a display.

Unless they're referring to HTC's software suite (Viveport I think it's
called), which very few people use because it's some of the worst software
I've ever seen. For example, it somehow managed to jam the entire 2.4GHz and
5GHz bands in my apartment while it was running. Not even sure how it's
possible to do that by accident.

~~~
larsberg
On desktop, it means that if the user chooses to install the Viveport suite,
that home experience and the suite will provide Firefox Reality as the default
browser.

For all-in-one devices, Firefox Reality will be preinstalled and the default
browser.

------
Animats
Mozilla needs to focus on their main product. I finally "upgraded" Firefox on
an old 4 GB Windows 7 machine. It's bigger, slower, and crashes every time it
exits.

~~~
samllhands
Hey i am using Windows 7 and Firefox as daily 'driver' here.the lastest
firefox is rocking here as i can tell.

------
tree_of_item
I don't have a clue about VR stuff, and this is the first time I'm hearing
about "Firefox Reality". Why do you need a special browser? What's different
about this one?

~~~
Brakenshire
A parallelizable layout engine should make it a lot easier to get the kind of
framerate needed for vr. Mozilla have used this as a test-case for Servo. I’ve
previously criticized them for it as an extreme niche market and a diversion
from mainstream use cases, but happy to swallow my words if it goes well.

~~~
wpietri
I was indeed wondering about how niche this was. Are there any reliable usage
statistics for, say, how many people currently use a VR browser daily?

(And to forestall the inevitable comment, I understand the _potential_ of VR,
and have since the 1990s VR wave. What I'm wondering about is actual sustained
(that is, non-novelty) use.)

~~~
andybak
It's rather chicken and egg at the moment but if you believe in the web and
you think VR is an important new medium it's important that the web doesn't
get left out of the party.

Something has to be the connecting tissue of the multiverse and we'd better
hope it's not Facebook or something equally proprietary.

~~~
wpietri
Sorry if I wasn't clear, but the theory that "VR is an important new medium"
is exactly what I wanted empirical data to test. I was not asking about
potential; I was asking about current sustained use.

~~~
andybak
Yeah. I was trying in a roundabout way to say "Current usage is probably low
but this is why I think it's still an important strategic move". It's
definitely about having faith in VR as a medium rather than "oh wow. Look how
successful VR is already!" \- because it isn't.

~~~
wpietri
Thanks, but when I said I was trying to forestall the inevitable comment about
potential, it was exactly that sort of faith-based reply I was hoping to
avoid.

~~~
andybak
I'm finding it hard to imagine what kind of evidence would be of use in a
scenario like this. Some kind of Gartner hand-wavey focus-group thing?

~~~
wpietri
You don't have to imagine. I gave a clear example: DAU statistics for a VR
browser. Or you could look at basically any successful technology, look at it
on the way up, and ask what the early signs were that it was seeing
significant use beyond novelty purchase. (That is in Moore's model getting out
of the "innovator/techie" market segment and into pragmatic use.)

For literally my entire adult life people have been talking about VR as the
coming big thing. I'm 100% over hearing about that, especially in response to
very specific questions about actual use.

------
ccnafr
But, why?

~~~
moosingin3space
I'm going to offer a different explanation, but first, the standard one:
Mozilla doesn't want to miss a paradigm shift, especially one where the only
players currently in it are very proprietary. They learned their lesson with
mobile.

One thing that many of us, myself included, are very excited about regarding
the Servo/WebRender/Quantum projects is the ability for a fast, parallel web
rendering engine to open new possibilities, such as how V8's JIT significantly
pushed the envelope of what was possible. Now that JavaScript is acceptably
fast, and we have WebAssembly for cases where control over memory layout is
necessary, network speeds are the bottleneck of most applications. WebRender's
big concept of rendering the entire web at "maximum FPS" is pretty awesome,
but it's not pushing the envelope by itself, since framework and application
developers have been treating "minimize DOM manipulation" as an important
optimization. There's clearly potential with WebRender, but if a majority of
used webpages are already rendering at an adequate framerate due to framework-
level optimizations (and prior browser optimizations like Electrolysis and
Stylo), it may be viewed as superfluous, despite potentially huge advantages.

I think the research in this direction is beneficial, and as a result, I'd
like the Servo project to be allowed to continue developing cool stuff. As
Servo won't replace Gecko in Firefox, it needs to try more challenging tasks
to continue to push its envelope. WebRender has a ton of potential in the
WebVR space, since a Web Components-based VR system would rely heavily on a
performant DOM. Such a project would push Servo to continue development in
preparation for a more functional future web.

~~~
floatboth
WR doesn't help much with DOM update related issues, WR comes into play after
that, when it's pixel time. WR is pushing the envelope for creative (ab)use of
DOM elements as graphics primitives, like in that spinning cubes demo :) but
on a more serious note, leveraging the GPU makes a lot of sense because it's
been sitting there mostly unused (only used for layer compositing) when
browsing, and it's more efficient at graphics operations.

That said, _Servo itself_ has a fresh DOM implementation and I think there was
work on making it really fast.

~~~
moosingin3space
In retrospect, you're correct. I should have said "WR reduces the cost of the
paint/composite cycle".

------
mrlala
Why would they deal with HTC and not just Steam in general.

I have had Vive since day 1. I am never touching anything HTC again. I'm happy
enough with the device and technology I have- but the HTC software is
horrendous and there's no place for it. I've heard just horror story after
horror story of HTC customer service / repair, wanting $200 for a new
controller etc.

Vive Pro is a complete joke, in price.

HTC hasn't done anything positive since the release of the original vive.

~~~
amatecha
You might notice HTC Vive seems to be distancing themselves from Steam,
including focusing pretty much entirely on their own Viveport platform. Though
I'm not sure why, that seems to be the mentality behind their current
direction.

~~~
1auralynn
To non-gamers, Steam looks kinda wacky - there's crazy popups, really intense
graphics, nonstandard UIs, and it has to update most times it launches. It's
also blocked on lots of networks - businesses, schools, etc. I personally love
Steam and its craziness, but that's the main reason - HTC wants Vive to become
mainstream and to capitalize on other uses for VR besides gaming.

