Comment by WhatIsDukkha | Hacker News Reader

Comment by WhatIsDukkha | Hacker News Reader

(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...

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.

Probably worth mentioning, Firefox VR is also going targeting 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.

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.

> 1- Firefox Reality is actually "Servo" ie the Rust based browser Mozilla has been developing for years.

Firefox Reality currently uses GeckoView, Gecko repackaged in a WebView-like embeddable Android component. The Firefox Reality team is still working on experimental support for Servo:

https://github.com/MozillaReality/FirefoxReality/#experiment...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com