Mozilla adds WebVR support to Firefox Nightly, enabling Oculus Rift with add-on
Firefox enters the realm of virtual reality with the Oculus Rift — Summary:Mozilla has added support for virtual reality apps running on the Oculus Rift headset to an experimental version of the Firefox browser.
Context & Ripple Effects
In January 2015 Mozilla's WebVR work was an experiment buried in [[a:|Firefox Nightly]], gated behind an add-on and tied to a single headset — the Oculus Rift. The corpus shows what grew out of that seed: Firefox 55 shipped the WebVR standard as a stable feature in 2017, by which point Edge and Chrome had already crossed the same line.
First-order effects
- Web developers can now build browser-delivered VR experiences for Oculus Rift owners without writing native Rift apps, collapsing the toolchain to HTML and JavaScript.
- The move puts Firefox on a collision course with Chrome and Edge, which per the coverage already supported WebVR when Firefox made it standard in 55.