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Comment by mmastrac | Hacker News Reader

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. :)

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In particular, Firefox Reality is just a consumer of GeckoView.

Working on Firefox Reality has beneficial effects on Gecko's general ability to be embedded.

Embedding in other Android apps is not really what we expect in general by being embeddable. Servo for instance is easy to embed since you just need to provide it a GL context and feed it events. This is far from being the case with Gecko unfortunately. Chromium is pretty good also especially with the Ozone layer.

From what I've heard, it's not an Android-exclusive effort, and eventually Gecko will become embeddable again on desktop too. Camino Resurrection anyone? :)

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.

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.

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.

The Firefox Reality team is much smaller than the FirefoxOS team was (i.e., by more than an order of magnitude).

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