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Comment by drawkbox | Hacker News Reader

Excellent choice, Mozilla is killing it with WebGL + asm.js right now among many other things. Probably the best Firefox and Mozilla has ever been so far. As a game developer targeting WebGL/asm.js what they are doing is awesome, almost like a new console. Both Unity and Unreal have their engines running well on it. Mozilla is the new game developers favorite, Chrome is nice as well but needs something like asm.js optimizations.

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I hope they reconsider putting more funding and efforts behind Persona. In the list of things that the web needs, it's pretty high.

They have already "handed it off to the community" so they can focus on other things. It won't be getting more funding or effort from Mozilla.

edit: I just reread and realised you said "reconsider" and not "consider". Implying you already knew this, sorry.

Here is the blog post in case anyone missed it anyway: http://identity.mozilla.com/post/78873831485/transitioning-p...

and on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7362613

> It won't be getting more funding or effort from Mozilla.

Correction: There aren't any more employees being paid to develop Persona. Mozilla is still paying for the infrastructure, and the community (which includes paid employees like myself who want to work on Persona on the side) is still working on it. I actually got a pull request merged just yesterday (my first!). There's also ops/IT staff who will be helping to deploy and respond to service disruptions.

<hope>We could very well find that after Firefox Accounts is up and running that focusing employees back on Persona is the right thing to do.</hope>

Brendan was very involved with the decision to mothball Persona, so you can be pretty sure this won't change that decision.

> Both Unity and Unreal have their engines running well

Running well? You'll know there are still tough problems next year. No one download 100 MB or 200 MB scripts and assets to play a game. In the past, all such resource rich Flash or Unity Web Player games have failed. No exception.

The relief is Mozilla people actually know this problem (I talked with them at GDC).

AAA games are just too rich to "browse" on the web. People close their browser windows within several seconds. Typical home internet bandwidth is narrower than Blu-ray or DVD-ROM, even in advanced countries. Furthermore, browser cache can't handle big resources. You won't even gain server costs.

Have you played a flash game lately? The initial program begins running really quickly, where it then downloads assets using a separate loader while a splash screen displays. Sony also ran into this problem with the massive files (20 - 40 GB) for their disc-based games that are also available for download, but somehow (in many cases) the games can be played while the download is happening, as the most critical parts are downloaded first.

Browser gaming may or may not take off, but I really don't see asset-size being the rope with which it hangs itself.

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