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Comment by jraph | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

> 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.

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?

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