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Comment by moron4hire | Hacker News Reader

Lack of OffscreenCanvas (without setting a flag) and OffscreenCanvasRenderingContext2D in WebWorkers (no flag at all) makes my WebXR project almost unusable (I have to jump through some ugly hoops of fading the view to black during scene loading to keep the user from throwing up from the render thread frame drops). Having to polyfill WebXR out of the ancient WebVR API is a pain, too.

Normally, the fact that practically nobody actually uses Firefox would mean it's not a huge problem. But the only standalone VR headsets with a Chromium-based browser are the Facebook headsets. If Firefox were better, I could be running twice as many of the not-Facebook-encumbered Pico Neo headsets for the same price. As it stands, Oculus for Business headsets are almost the same price as a Valve Index, once you add in the mandatory "support" yearly licensing fee.

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> Normally, the fact that practically nobody actually uses Firefox would mean it's not a huge problem.

I assume you mean "practically nobody without an adblocker". I dread the day we could have to live without Firefox. Don't dismiss it like that, please.

I'm sorry, but it's not my fault that Firefox only has 4% market share in the world. Mozilla dismissed themselves.

I'm pretty sure the primary driver of that was Google turning Chrome into shovelware bundled with Adobe Flash and marketing it aggressively.

Cuz Firefox was in such a strong position before Google came around, right.

Mozilla has never been a competitive company. They've always leaned heavily on the illusion of being a non-profit. They've always sold the "eat your vegetables" version of web browsing, without actually offering anything compelling over the competition. We're just expected to use Firefox because "it's made by not-Google".

Firefox was in fact in a stronger position before Google turned Chrome into shovelware, yes.

I came from another post to see your commenting style. You use “in fact” a lot without supporting your statement lmao.

You were clearly the issue in the other thread.

It's a real shame that FF isn't on feature parity with Chrome in some ways, but 7% is not "practically nobody".

With Chrome, Edge, Opera, and Brave all running on Chrome, we're getting awfuly close to a browser monoculture - one controlled by Google.

Supporting FF might be a pain in some cases, but failing to do so drives users away from FF in the long run, and drives away FF users from your site.

I know web devs have limited resources, but look at it this way: supporting FF and Chrome is a lot less of a pain than it used to be supporting IE.

It's really more like 4%, and falling every year.

My job is not to drive users to Firefox. My job is to create a product that people can use. And in my particular case, my job involves creating a product that doesn't physically harm people.

I agree that browser monoculture is a problem. But there is another problem that Mozilla is not the company that is helping with the problem.

EDIT: to go a little further on this, it's not physically possible to create a good WebXR experience in Firefox, at this time. Despite their announcements of focusing on Hubs as one of the few projects they kept around after the most recent purge, there are key technologies that are fundamentally missing from Firefox that have no replacement. And then they have the termerity to user-agent sniff Chromium browsers on desktop PCs and tell you that they supposedly don't support WebXR, that you need to download Firefox to use Hubs. So it seems even Mozilla doesn't really give a shit about the Open Web.

Can you share anything about what it is that you're working on? I never understood why web VR/AR APIs even exist and why anyone would want to use them with the hardware we have today.

It's a foriegn language instruction environment for government employees. You meet with your language instructor in culturally-appropriate environment and role-play different language training scenarios.

Why shouldn't the browser have VR APIs? WebXR allows us to iterate faster, across more devices, and more easily integrate with other services than building in a framework like Unity can do for us. I've spent the last 6 years doing nothing but WebXR and Unity work and WebXR is hands down far easier to develop the sort of application we're building.

No, you're not going to build MS Flight Simulator in WebXR, but you probably weren't going to do that in Unity, either, and ain't nobody got the budget for AAA++ graphics anyway. The folks who do graphically intensive work in Unity have stripped large parts of Unity away to make it possible.

I don't understand your last question.

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