Firefox Gets Better Video Gaming and Warns of Non-Secure Websites | Hacker News Reader

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

blog.mozilla.org

175 pointskungfudoi44 comments

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/

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

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

Mine crashes after all the assets have been loaded. Having trouble getting the report, sorry!

Type about:crashes into the location bar and hit enter to find your crashes.

What year and model is your Mac?

MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013) 2.3 GHz Intel Core i7 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3 NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M 2048 MB

I did run into this driver issue. I have that same machine, so I'm looking into it.

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.)

Same model laptop but I'm stuck spinning counter-clockwise instead of panning up.

Now I'm back in the office with a wired in mouse, it's working fine.

Build once, test everywhere!

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Unity and Unreal both provide limited exporting to WebGL.

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

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."

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

Surprisingly, it says "true"

OK. What does "window.WebGLRenderingContext" return when evaluated in the console? What about "window.WebGL2RenderingContext"?

They both print nothing to the console. However, the console greets me with an interesting message:

> Error: WebGL: Failed to create WebGL context: WebGL creation failed: * WebGL 2 requires support for the following features: get_integer64_indexed * Exhausted GL driver options.

Could this have something to do with having the 32 bit version instead of the 64 bit version?

I'm asking around to see what might be going on, but it's more likely to have to do with the specific graphics card and drivers you have than with 32-bit vs 64-bit.

Does about:support say anything interesting in the "graphics" section?

There you go: http://imgur.com/R3GVqSx

the "graphic card" would be Intel's HD Graphics...

edit: the problem seems to be (somewhat) debian related. I found this on SE (see first answer):

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/207855/cant-get-int...

EDIT 2: After installing the correct drivers from the backport repository it finally works!! Thanks for your support!

Excellent!

The day will come when graphics drivers aren't a pain. It really will. I have faith, and have for decades... ;)

"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".

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

A URL to something that shows the problem really would be useful here. I can profile and all that, but it would be good to be profiling something that actually shows the problem.

Tell ya what, give me a few hours to unwind from my gig this morning and I'll see if I can't get my old server actually up and online and port-forwarded. If I can (this assumes I actually have spare ports on the router) I'll send you the link, as I see that No-IP just sent me a renewal notice for the game's domain name anyways.

Looking for my spare LCD so I can actually see what I'm doing, on top of mining out a huge garnet pocket. Gimme some time!

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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