9 ms·

Mozilla Games Technology Roadmap

112 points by AndrewDucker 11y ago

ganessh 11y ago
This is awesome :)
AndrewDucker 11y ago
One of the things Mozilla could do is to make Flash run better. My wife prefers Chrome to Firefox purely because Flash tends to stutter more on Firefox, and she plays a lot of Facebook games.
- pervycreeper 11y ago
  The whole point is to replace Flash with a better alternative.
  - anon1385 11y ago
    Or to put it another way: they want to turn normal web pages into Flash sites.
    - leohutson 11y ago
      The only reason flash is blockable is because other web technologies, primarily open ones, have limited the need for it. If no attempt was made to match the feature sets of closed, single vendor plugins like flash, realplayer, QuickTime, ActiveX etc, then the majority of the webapps and media sites would be made using those tools. I think the same is true for games now. Do you really want every game engine developer to have their own plugin, with all the security vulnerabilities that will entail?
      - pjmlp 11y ago
        No, because we already have native and the browser should be left alone for interactive documents.
    - pervycreeper 11y ago
      I think that's a separate problem. We've already crossed the rubicon on having "active" content on the web. A valid concern, nonetheless.
  - cousin_it 11y ago
    I wish that alternative was confined to a plugin running in a rectangle on the page. Otherwise game theory incentives make every site add a megabyte of JavaScript to every article, and stop you from reading unless you load the whole megabyte.
    - fbender 11y ago
      That's happening today (just check the "big" news sites) just as it happened before with Flash-based sites. But that is just bad habit of programmers, not the issue with the technology per se.
    - SquareWheel 11y ago
      Non-essential Javascript is usually added to the bottom of the page, or set to async to prevent it from blocking page loading.
  - devloper 11y ago
    The only thing they forgot is consulting Flash developers. Most of them despise HTML5 as inferior. Developer experience is as important as user experience.
- rockdoe 11y ago
  One of the things Mozilla could do is to make Flash run better. One of the few things Mozilla CANNOT do is to make Flash run better. Flash is closed source, proprietary software, owned by Adobe. Google did their own implementation (of at least the browser interface + sandbox), I supposed after signing plenty of NDA and handing money over. That's not something Mozilla can (or should) do as an open source project. Whatever plans you will go looking for at Mozilla, you'll never find "improve Flash" in one of them, even as an option. It just isn't possible. It's like asking Mozilla to make Office run better. They've offered Shumway as an interdependent re-implementation, but I'm guessing it has tons of compatibility issues as Flash isn't a standard. You're probably better off just uninstalling Flash in Firefox, to be honest.
  - AndrewDucker 11y ago
    Flash runs better in Chrome than it does in Firefox. Therefore, either the Flash people are deliberately detecting that it's being run in Firefox and slowing it down, or Firefox is doing _something_ which has made it stutter intermittently on every PC that my wife plays Facebook games on. Would you care to hazard a guess as to what might be going on?
    - pcwalton 11y ago
      Google is essentially maintaining Flash for Chrome at this point, with the PPAPI port.
    - Mikeb85 11y ago
      Chrome maintains their own build of Flash (presumably after an agreement with Adobe). Firefox doesn't. It also doesn't update flash for you, you need to do that. That's the difference.
    - cpeterso 11y ago
      Chrome's Flash plugin uses Google's Pepper plugin API (PPAPI) instead of NPAPI. So Google can more tightly integrate Flash and Chrome. I've heard from someone familiar with the code that Google's Flash "uses 110% of the documented Pepper API", meaning there is lots of undocumented or underspecified details.
fenomas 11y ago
Side question, but is there a way to package content with Firefox as a desktop app (like node-webkit/nwjs does with Chromium)? Seems to me that one nice feature for HTML gaming is the ability to deploy a paid version to Steam/GOG/etc..
- fbender 11y ago
  Yes, it's part of the OpenWebApps[1] initative. As far as I know, however, there's no standard way to package them up with the runtime for shipping[2], except for XUL Runner (which does not target OpenWebApps). For Android, there's an APK packager[3][4]. [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Apps/Quickstart/Build/Intro_to_open_web_apps https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Apps/Quickstart/Build/In... [2] There's none for Webkit/Chromium either, as nwjs/atom-shell are third-party projects. [3] https://developer.mozilla.org/de/Marketplace/Options/Open_web_apps_for_android https://developer.mozilla.org/de/Marketplace/Options/Open_we... [4] https://github.com/mozilla/apk-factory-service https://github.com/mozilla/apk-factory-service
- ndesaulniers 11y ago
  yes: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/06/build-an-html5-game-and-distribute-it/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/06/build-an-html5-game-and-di...
greggman 11y ago
Can we please not restrict APIs to https only ? My game system requires http because it serves pages from your home computer/console to your phone's browser on the local network http://docs.happyfuntimes.net http://docs.happyfuntimes.net Either that or please suggest a viable workaround
- the8472 11y ago
  I think the "new APIs only on https" plan has exceptions for lan-local addresses or at least for localhost.
  - greggman 11y ago
    that doesn't help. The phones don't connect to localhost they connect to a PC
    - the8472 11y ago
      user overrides are also an option: http://www.w3.org/TR/powerful-features/#development-environments http://www.w3.org/TR/powerful-features/#development-environm...
      - greggman 11y ago
        That's not really a solution either. You really expect your house guests or people visiting a museum or event to do a technical reconfiguring of their phone just to interact with the installation or game?
        the8472 11y ago
        I would think that museum should be able to get a SSL cert. But yeah, "SSL-only" kinda breaks the end-to-end principle since we have no mechanism to assign SSL certs to endpoints on demand. So it seems flawed on a conceptual level.
        11y ago
the8472 11y ago
> Improve browser storage capabilities. I wonder why local storage even is a thing. It doesn't interface nicely with facilities provided by host OS. Providing file IO to a fenced-off, per-origin part of the filesystem would allow people to roll their own data serialization and allow users and desktop applications to drop in/pull out files as they desire.
cromwellian 11y ago
I wonder what they mean by scalable source maps? The last time they proposed an alternative to source maps they basically proposed shipping down an AST structure which was even larger. Current source maps already tax the debugger for large programs, so much so that for GWT we had to implement optimizations in the source map generator to avoid generating nodes that are not helpful for debugging but which cause bloat.
socialist_coder 11y ago
It's disappointing to me that it's 2015 and we have yet to have a good solution for browser games. Flash is still your best choice by a huge margin. 4 years ago I was very bullish on HTML5. Flash was dying, HTML5 was the future! It was right around the corner! I think a lot of people agreed with me. 4 years later - what has changed? Decent webGL support but still driven by a terribly slow javascript runtime. ASM.js gets us halfway there but it's brittle and does't even run in Chrome so it's basically worthless for anything that isn't a tech demo. The audio API is also still very limited. We've been trying to port our Unity mobile app to webGL for 6 months now and it's been nothing but pain. In hindsight, it was a mistake. I was bullish on HTML5 back in 2011 and I was bullish on webGL in 2014. I was wrong, again. So, I'd like to have faith in these efforts, but as they say, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."
- socialist_coder 11y ago
  The other thing that really sucks right now for game developers is that Chrome has disabled its NPAPI plugin support so you can't rely on the Unity webplayer anymore either. As the CTO of a mobile/web game startup (using Unity), I'm really struggling on what to do here. We have been trying to launch on Facebook Canvas since late 2014 and so far the finish line isn't even in sight.
  - rockdoe 11y ago
    I'm not very familiar with Unity but doesn't it support real HTML5?
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- matthewmacleod 11y ago
  There's a little bit of misinformation there! First off, HTML5 has come a long way – there are still areas that need work, but generally I've seen lots of great HTML5 games and the field has improved remarkably in the past 4 years. WebGL support is now cross-browser. The JavaScript runtime is not terribly slow, and I don't know if you're a bit confused about ASM.js – it does run in Chrome, and pretty well too. However, it's likely to be displaced by WebAssembly going forward, if I understand correctly, and that will be cross-platform and cross-browser. It'll take a little while, but we're on the way there! Unity's HTML5 examples are pretty good – http://beta.unity3d.com/jonas/AngryBots/ http://beta.unity3d.com/jonas/AngryBots/ for example looks great and runs well.
rockdoe 11y ago
What are the plans for shipping 64 bit Firefox? I see they have Nightlies, but what about release?
- cpeterso 11y ago
  64-bit Firefox is available in the Beta channel. It may "soft launch" in Firefox 40, but some features are still incomplete (like NPAPI plugin support). https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/win64 https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/win64
james33 11y ago
This all sounds great, but I didn't see anything about simple HTML5 Canvas performance. Firefox is in dead last when it comes to the 2d rendering performance. I can run our HTML5 games at a smooth 60 FPS on Chrome, Safari, Opera and IE, but only get 10-15 FPS on Firefox on the same computer.
- sonnyp 11y ago
  it's probably a bug, you should report it along with OS and hardware details
  - james33 11y ago
    It is not related to a specific platform, we've tested on many different computers and operating systems. We also get reports from users all the time saying the game is barely playable on Firefox but works great on any other browser they use.
    - cpeterso 11y ago
      Is this a particular GoldFire game? Can you share a link?
      - james33 11y ago
        Yes, it is http://casinorpg.com http://casinorpg.com (the rest of our games don't use canvas).
        cpeterso 11y ago
        Thanks. I'll take a look.
        bzbarsky 11y ago
        Hey, I've been trying to look into this a bit. Which OS (or OSes?) do you see 10-15fps on? Because so far on Mac I'm not seeing any differences compared to Chrome, but I may just be missing it...
falcor84 11y ago
This is wonderful news. When this takes hold (and assuming the driver situation improves), I'll be able to finally get rid of my home Windows game machine in favor of GNU/Linux.
karmakaze 11y ago
I thought 'Games' was a verb and thought how does one game a roadmap?
Animats 11y ago
WebAssembly? We got rid of Flash for that? Also, is there really that much demand for games in the browser? If you'd like to see a few thousand bad ones, go to "newgrounds.com".
- CyberDildonics 11y ago
  I hope not everyone is this short sited.

112 points by AndrewDucker 11y ago

This is awesome :)

One of the things Mozilla could do is to make Flash run better. My wife prefers Chrome to Firefox purely because Flash tends to stutter more on Firefox, and she plays a lot of Facebook games.

pervycreeper 11y ago
The whole point is to replace Flash with a better alternative.
- anon1385 11y ago
  Or to put it another way: they want to turn normal web pages into Flash sites.
  - leohutson 11y ago
    The only reason flash is blockable is because other web technologies, primarily open ones, have limited the need for it. If no attempt was made to match the feature sets of closed, single vendor plugins like flash, realplayer, QuickTime, ActiveX etc, then the majority of the webapps and media sites would be made using those tools. I think the same is true for games now. Do you really want every game engine developer to have their own plugin, with all the security vulnerabilities that will entail?
    - pjmlp 11y ago
      No, because we already have native and the browser should be left alone for interactive documents.
  - pervycreeper 11y ago
    I think that's a separate problem. We've already crossed the rubicon on having "active" content on the web. A valid concern, nonetheless.
- cousin_it 11y ago
  I wish that alternative was confined to a plugin running in a rectangle on the page. Otherwise game theory incentives make every site add a megabyte of JavaScript to every article, and stop you from reading unless you load the whole megabyte.
  - fbender 11y ago
    That's happening today (just check the "big" news sites) just as it happened before with Flash-based sites. But that is just bad habit of programmers, not the issue with the technology per se.
  - SquareWheel 11y ago
    Non-essential Javascript is usually added to the bottom of the page, or set to async to prevent it from blocking page loading.
- devloper 11y ago
  The only thing they forgot is consulting Flash developers. Most of them despise HTML5 as inferior. Developer experience is as important as user experience.
rockdoe 11y ago
One of the things Mozilla could do is to make Flash run better. One of the few things Mozilla CANNOT do is to make Flash run better. Flash is closed source, proprietary software, owned by Adobe. Google did their own implementation (of at least the browser interface + sandbox), I supposed after signing plenty of NDA and handing money over. That's not something Mozilla can (or should) do as an open source project. Whatever plans you will go looking for at Mozilla, you'll never find "improve Flash" in one of them, even as an option. It just isn't possible. It's like asking Mozilla to make Office run better. They've offered Shumway as an interdependent re-implementation, but I'm guessing it has tons of compatibility issues as Flash isn't a standard. You're probably better off just uninstalling Flash in Firefox, to be honest.
- AndrewDucker 11y ago
  Flash runs better in Chrome than it does in Firefox. Therefore, either the Flash people are deliberately detecting that it's being run in Firefox and slowing it down, or Firefox is doing _something_ which has made it stutter intermittently on every PC that my wife plays Facebook games on. Would you care to hazard a guess as to what might be going on?
  - pcwalton 11y ago
    Google is essentially maintaining Flash for Chrome at this point, with the PPAPI port.
  - Mikeb85 11y ago
    Chrome maintains their own build of Flash (presumably after an agreement with Adobe). Firefox doesn't. It also doesn't update flash for you, you need to do that. That's the difference.
  - cpeterso 11y ago
    Chrome's Flash plugin uses Google's Pepper plugin API (PPAPI) instead of NPAPI. So Google can more tightly integrate Flash and Chrome. I've heard from someone familiar with the code that Google's Flash "uses 110% of the documented Pepper API", meaning there is lots of undocumented or underspecified details.

fenomas 11y ago

Side question, but is there a way to package content with Firefox as a desktop app (like node-webkit/nwjs does with Chromium)? Seems to me that one nice feature for HTML gaming is the ability to deploy a paid version to Steam/GOG/etc..

fbender 11y ago
Yes, it's part of the OpenWebApps[1] initative. As far as I know, however, there's no standard way to package them up with the runtime for shipping[2], except for XUL Runner (which does not target OpenWebApps). For Android, there's an APK packager[3][4]. [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Apps/Quickstart/Build/Intro_to_open_web_apps https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Apps/Quickstart/Build/In... [2] There's none for Webkit/Chromium either, as nwjs/atom-shell are third-party projects. [3] https://developer.mozilla.org/de/Marketplace/Options/Open_web_apps_for_android https://developer.mozilla.org/de/Marketplace/Options/Open_we... [4] https://github.com/mozilla/apk-factory-service https://github.com/mozilla/apk-factory-service
ndesaulniers 11y ago
yes: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/06/build-an-html5-game-and-distribute-it/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/06/build-an-html5-game-and-di...

greggman 11y ago

Can we please not restrict APIs to https only ? My game system requires http because it serves pages from your home computer/console to your phone's browser on the local network http://docs.happyfuntimes.net http://docs.happyfuntimes.net Either that or please suggest a viable workaround

the8472 11y ago
I think the "new APIs only on https" plan has exceptions for lan-local addresses or at least for localhost.
- greggman 11y ago
  that doesn't help. The phones don't connect to localhost they connect to a PC
  - the8472 11y ago
    user overrides are also an option: http://www.w3.org/TR/powerful-features/#development-environments http://www.w3.org/TR/powerful-features/#development-environm...
    - greggman 11y ago
      That's not really a solution either. You really expect your house guests or people visiting a museum or event to do a technical reconfiguring of their phone just to interact with the installation or game?
      - the8472 11y ago
        I would think that museum should be able to get a SSL cert. But yeah, "SSL-only" kinda breaks the end-to-end principle since we have no mechanism to assign SSL certs to endpoints on demand. So it seems flawed on a conceptual level.
        11y ago

the8472 11y ago

> Improve browser storage capabilities. I wonder why local storage even is a thing. It doesn't interface nicely with facilities provided by host OS. Providing file IO to a fenced-off, per-origin part of the filesystem would allow people to roll their own data serialization and allow users and desktop applications to drop in/pull out files as they desire.

cromwellian 11y ago

I wonder what they mean by scalable source maps? The last time they proposed an alternative to source maps they basically proposed shipping down an AST structure which was even larger. Current source maps already tax the debugger for large programs, so much so that for GWT we had to implement optimizations in the source map generator to avoid generating nodes that are not helpful for debugging but which cause bloat.

socialist_coder 11y ago

It's disappointing to me that it's 2015 and we have yet to have a good solution for browser games. Flash is still your best choice by a huge margin. 4 years ago I was very bullish on HTML5. Flash was dying, HTML5 was the future! It was right around the corner! I think a lot of people agreed with me. 4 years later - what has changed? Decent webGL support but still driven by a terribly slow javascript runtime. ASM.js gets us halfway there but it's brittle and does't even run in Chrome so it's basically worthless for anything that isn't a tech demo. The audio API is also still very limited. We've been trying to port our Unity mobile app to webGL for 6 months now and it's been nothing but pain. In hindsight, it was a mistake. I was bullish on HTML5 back in 2011 and I was bullish on webGL in 2014. I was wrong, again. So, I'd like to have faith in these efforts, but as they say, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."

socialist_coder 11y ago
The other thing that really sucks right now for game developers is that Chrome has disabled its NPAPI plugin support so you can't rely on the Unity webplayer anymore either. As the CTO of a mobile/web game startup (using Unity), I'm really struggling on what to do here. We have been trying to launch on Facebook Canvas since late 2014 and so far the finish line isn't even in sight.
- rockdoe 11y ago
  I'm not very familiar with Unity but doesn't it support real HTML5?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
matthewmacleod 11y ago
There's a little bit of misinformation there! First off, HTML5 has come a long way – there are still areas that need work, but generally I've seen lots of great HTML5 games and the field has improved remarkably in the past 4 years. WebGL support is now cross-browser. The JavaScript runtime is not terribly slow, and I don't know if you're a bit confused about ASM.js – it does run in Chrome, and pretty well too. However, it's likely to be displaced by WebAssembly going forward, if I understand correctly, and that will be cross-platform and cross-browser. It'll take a little while, but we're on the way there! Unity's HTML5 examples are pretty good – http://beta.unity3d.com/jonas/AngryBots/ http://beta.unity3d.com/jonas/AngryBots/ for example looks great and runs well.

rockdoe 11y ago

What are the plans for shipping 64 bit Firefox? I see they have Nightlies, but what about release?

cpeterso 11y ago
64-bit Firefox is available in the Beta channel. It may "soft launch" in Firefox 40, but some features are still incomplete (like NPAPI plugin support). https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/win64 https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/win64

james33 11y ago

This all sounds great, but I didn't see anything about simple HTML5 Canvas performance. Firefox is in dead last when it comes to the 2d rendering performance. I can run our HTML5 games at a smooth 60 FPS on Chrome, Safari, Opera and IE, but only get 10-15 FPS on Firefox on the same computer.

sonnyp 11y ago
it's probably a bug, you should report it along with OS and hardware details
- james33 11y ago
  It is not related to a specific platform, we've tested on many different computers and operating systems. We also get reports from users all the time saying the game is barely playable on Firefox but works great on any other browser they use.
  - cpeterso 11y ago
    Is this a particular GoldFire game? Can you share a link?
    - james33 11y ago
      Yes, it is http://casinorpg.com http://casinorpg.com (the rest of our games don't use canvas).
      - cpeterso 11y ago
        Thanks. I'll take a look.
      - bzbarsky 11y ago
        Hey, I've been trying to look into this a bit. Which OS (or OSes?) do you see 10-15fps on? Because so far on Mac I'm not seeing any differences compared to Chrome, but I may just be missing it...

falcor84 11y ago

This is wonderful news. When this takes hold (and assuming the driver situation improves), I'll be able to finally get rid of my home Windows game machine in favor of GNU/Linux.

karmakaze 11y ago

I thought 'Games' was a verb and thought how does one game a roadmap?

Animats 11y ago

WebAssembly? We got rid of Flash for that? Also, is there really that much demand for games in the browser? If you'd like to see a few thousand bad ones, go to "newgrounds.com".

CyberDildonics 11y ago
I hope not everyone is this short sited.