Wolvic, a new browser project picking up where Firefox Reality leaves off | Hacker News Reader

Wolvic, a new browser project picking up where Firefox Reality leaves off

igalia.com

180 pointsVinnl74 comments

It seems based on Gecko?

> Mozilla invested a lot into R&D in XR in the late 2010s, and in late 2018 they released an experimental browser called Firefox Reality. It was a great entry into the XR field, helping establish what a browser in these devices really looks like, and figure out the unique challenges. Today we’re excited to take up this experiment and continue this work as a complete project.

> [links to https://blog.mozilla.org/mozilla/update-on-firefox-reality/]

A Gecko-based browser would be refreshing!

Igalia really seems to do interesting stuff.

> Igalia really seems to do interesting stuff.

A lot of which is WebKit based, so this is indeed an interesting twist.

Yes, they even say it in the post, which is a bit confusing since I was specifically looking for this.

Well, I hope they'll contribute to Gecko to make it faster at rendering 3D with WebGL, or even help adding WebGPU support. Because for now, perfs aint good compared to chromium based browsers... Firefox is often way slower when using heavy 3D apps.

I didn't know that. Why would firefox be slower than say chrome when if you use WebGL, the work is being done by the GPU anyway?

Perhaps Chrome utilises the GPU more efficiently than Firefox does.

You have to shuffle heaps of data between Javascript and the gpu, I’ve found Firefox’s js engine to be slower at doing that. Firefox also seems to call the garbage collector much more often, and do it’s business a bit slower.

Normally you don’t notice, but trying to keep things at 60fps it shows up rather quickly.

N=1

Ok so what's slower is the JS engine which is a more reasonable claim. My experience is it depends on the types of work your doing but in general, indeed, chrome seems faster. But Firefox has improved a lot with quantum.

If you have a nice reproducible case of the garbage collection problem, please file a bug https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Core&comp... and I'll take a look. I've seen some similar issues, but I don't have anything good to work against right now. (The first thing I'll do is grab a profile with https://profiler.firefox.com and that'll immediately tell basically what's going on. You could grab one too, and that'll be useful even if there's not an easy way to give me a reproduction.)

There's also a very recently landed change that might help, if the problem happens to be excessively long minor GCs (which is what I've seen with similar sites): https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1751162

Shuffling data to the GPU could be an interesting case too, but that's not handled by the JS engine itself so I'm not as familiar with how that works. It sounds like it might be worth a bug if there isn't one already (and feel free to file; we'll triage and determine if it's a duplicate.)

no GPU drivers do not support webGL natively.. Although gecko use Angle from google, 3D rendering is a multifactorial problems that can be optimized from many aspects of a web browser (display lists vs immediate rendering, various caching systems, direct compositing, a lot of low level optimizations, reducing memcpys, etc)

FWIW ANGLE is only used that way in Firefox on Windows.

Feel free to file bugs! I do like fixing WebGL perf issues!

Thanks for your service!

Oh, is that the case?

Last time I checked (which was admittedly 2-3 years ago), Chrome had considerable lag with VR whereas Firefox managed much better. Might depend on the GPU, of course.

We do right?! Thanks.

Can you confirm this is a Gecko based browser? I find the wording a bit ambiguous in the article. Thanks!

It is clear from the website https://www.wolvic.com/ > Wolvic begins a new branch of the evolutionary tree of the Firefox Reality Browser.

Wolvic begins its evolutionary fork pretty close to where Firefox Reality left off, so yes, it is Gecko based.

Nice! Is Igalia planning to work on webXR support for Gecko?

Firefox Reality also supports Servo as a browser engine, so this might be even more exciting! https://github.com/MozillaReality/FirefoxReality#experimenta...

Isnt Servo kinda dead project?

Not in a way that doesn't also state Firefox is dead.

Servo does not have a paid team of developers, whereas Firefox does. How about that?

As far as i know firefox has a paid team of managers. Developers, i don't know.

Well the linux foundation picked it up when mozilla dropped it so it's not dead, but the last commit was also 8 days ago so not very active either

As far as oss projects go, eight days ago seems pretty active compared to the usual "inactive project" having last commit dates of months ago

Well, at this rate, servo will never catch up with the ever expanding bloat of the web standards.

We are going to integrate this in our Lynx R-1 headset! Great to have something else than just chromium in this space.

I hadn't heard of these headsets. Is public developer documentation available?

By March we will release our OpenXR SDK. Our website for now is https://lynx-r.com

This is really interesting. Last night I was looking at FireFox Reality's repo and was pleasantly surprised to see [some newer commits][1]. Now today I see that Wolvic is [a fork of FireFox Reality][2] and that the commits were contributed from that project. I'm happy to see a private company fund new work on this front.

[1]: https://github.com/MozillaReality/FirefoxReality/commits/mai...

[2]: https://github.com/Igalia/wolvic

I'm always in favor of new browsers that are FOSS and don't use Blink!

> There is, of course, Firefox. Brave has a lion as a mascot, there are Puma and Dolphin browsers, and many smaller and historical browsers and projects within the browser space are named after animals

But the wolf name is already taken and on a browser based on Firefox too https://librewolf.net/

Note that I am still mad that librewolf was not named Windwolf or Waterwolf instead.

I think Waterwolf would get confused with Waterfox. Only a matter of time before wind and earth also get claimed by Firefox forks, though. New ones seem to pop up every year or so.

Volvic is a brand of water then Wolvic is probably a mineral water wolf

they do have an ad with a wolf

Looks like they are jumping on the whole "Meta" train, with enough expertise to make a dent.

I would be astonished though, if people used a web browser in virtual reality to do serious work.

I get this take... You might find my post on this topic interesting https://bkardell.com/blog/wolvic.html

Very excited to see this, my ongoing prediction is that the metaverse will be WebXR based. No 30% cut from walled gardens, and sites can evolve from static, 2D flat experiences to immersive ones. Of course, apps will work day one on any headset in a platform-agnostic manner. And for the spark, just wait until the Apple headset ships with WebXR and WebGPU supported by default....

Also, my team are currently working on bringing Unreal Engine to WebXR.

One Metaverse based on WebXR + CRDT for shared state of the world on top of WebRTC, please. With React on top.

UE5?

Fantastic piece of history about TBL and Ian Ritchie.

When APK of Wolvic for Quest 2?

Edit — found it: https://github.com/Igalia/wolvic/releases/download/0.9.3/Wol...

This reminds me of Virtual Desktop on Value.

Very compelling post, thanks for sharing!

A VR browser is however very useful eitherfor browsing 3d content or having access to content that is useful for other VR apps. Especially for standalone headsets where you can't just switch to your pc desktop.

I continue to be astonished (and dismayed) that people use a browser on the desktop to do serious work. Really, the browser provides a horrible user experience, no matter where you use it.

I miss native apps and the engineering that went into them, as compared to the slapdashery of web apps.

Serious work can be as little as searching for something and reading content. No reason why a web browser can not do this - in fact it was built for this purpose.

I've used passthru on the Quest 2 with a browser window hanging in my living room. There absolutely is an allure to having a tv as big as my wall playing a youtube video while I'm folding a mountain of laundry. Working, serious work it's a bit of a stretch at this moment yeah

I haven't used immersed yet, but the whole "I can see my environment and my hands and type on a keyboard I can see with N floating windows" thing is neat and will only get nicer as the resolution improves

I build a WebXR app at work. It's a virtual environment for taking foreign language classes. You travel around the world and talk about what you see in-language.

react-xr?

Hell no

Why not? Do you use vanilla WebXR?

Those... aren't the only two options. I use Three.js.

I never really saw what the hype was about React. It seems like most people who got really into it never really had much experience building componentized code before, so what they think of as being the "great" thing about React doesn't really need React at all.

Virtual DOM is overhead, overhead I can't really afford. I have to hit 120FPS on the Quest 2 with an immediate-mode renderer, when React's V-DOM was designed for a 60FPS retained-mode environment. It's just... too much of a leaky abstraction to deal with when I have about 8 milliseconds to do absolutely everything. And yes, I hit 120FPS.

Honestly, managing 3D objects is one of the smallest parts of my job. Some days, it can be all consuming, but other times, I can go weeks without touching the graphics. The biggest concern I have is with data management and efficient transmission and decoding of assets.

"As of today, Igalia has secured partial funding over the next two years"

Wondering who is funding the project, or does this mean they use their own money to fund this? That sounds more brave than Brave imo. Good luck!

The name is a little confusing, and makes it clear they are not native English speakers. It's not a bad name, but if someone says to me, "Hey, did you try Wolvic yet?" I'll spell it "Wolfic" or "Wolfik" or "Wolfick", definitely not "Wolvic". Confusing.

I would pronounce the 'v' in Wolvic like in "vision" and the in your words 'f' like in "elfic". Which would make it clear Wolvic is written with a v. Would I be wrong?

(not a native English speaker)

(we have a town called Volvic here, known for its water. Pronounced like in "vision". I would pronounce Wolvic the same way, except the first letter would be pronounced like in "well")

(the English pronunciation is not a gift)

It is clear to me as a native English speaker. We do have "wolves" already.

Also not a native speaker, I'd use the same pronunciation as you ("v" in "wolvic" is the same as in "elven", "f" in "wolfic"/"wolfish" is the same as in "elfic"/"elfish"). But the difference is quite subtle, I see it can be hard to tell apart in casual conversation when people pay less attention to enunciation.

Whereas to my UK eyes it's instantly reminiscent of Volvic[0] mineral water, which is definitely a V sound and doesn't read or sound strange at all (see also: pelvic, civic, Slavic). It wouldn't occur to me that there might be an F sound.

[0] https://www.volvic.co.uk/

Indeed, and wolves seems to be pronounced with a v both in the US and in the UK.

> UK: /wʊlvz/ US: (wŏŏlvz)

https://www.wordreference.com/enfr/wolves

You did think of Volvic as well!

Sounds good. Guess they'll do well with that name then.

Never great when a product name looks like a misspelling of another more well known product name.

It instantly reminded me of "Wolven + Loaves". You know, the one with the hipster ampersand.

Now I needs me a McWolven.

Interesting observation. Fwiw, I am definitely very much a native english speaker (in fact, I don't speak any other (non-programming) language very well), and I proposed the name. As the post says at the end - it doesn't hurt that the domains are available if you don't use a "real" world. I guess we'll see if this happens.

Apologies if it's not the type of feedback you are looking for, but I strongly agree with the OP. I find the name so confusing that I have trouble even thinking about it. Quite possibly the problem is me, but if you are trying to reach an American audience, consider doing further audience testing before investing too heavily in the name.

As another anecdata point - I’m also a native English speaker (US) and I have no issues whatsoever with the name or pronunciation.

Wolvic sounds more natural to me than your other suggestions. If someone verbally told me about the project, my first guess would be to spell it as Wolvic.

I can see possibly someone non native spelling it as Wulvic or Woolvic (if they heard the name in a conversation). I'm sure some may misspell it with an f also but if the project grows, it won't matter.

How did "wolf" get turned into "wolvic"? That section at the end just seems to take it for granted that permutation is totally normal.

I'd imagine the same way "wolf" gets turned into "wolves"?

Has anyone actually tried FF Reality/Wolvic and can comment on the text quality in XR?

I use FFR on my Oculus Quest 2. IME, text quality is more constrained by the res of the device, and I personally find it painful to read on my Quest - whether in FFR or Immersed - for extended periods. Others don't seem to have the issue, and people on HN have posted about working full-time in VR, so YMMV.

The question is about font rendering. Do they rasterize text into a texture, then draw the texture on a 3D plane in VR introducing artifacts at the second step, or do they rasterize text directly in 3D space using the view matrices?

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