71–80 of 154 posts
The WebGL demo "After the Flood" linked in their release summary post is really beautiful. I don't play games but this technology is very impressive. Try it for yourself if you're on an updated Firefox (51+): https://playcanv.as/e/p/44MRmJRU/
The web really has come a long, long ways.
I tested the FLAC playback, it plays only the first 9 seconds!
Out of curiosity I've just dropped ~450MB FLAC file in a new Firefox tab, and I must say I experience great stoner rock with no issues whatsoever.
I see the WebGL improvements and how on their blog they market it as "Firefox Gets Better Video Gaming" and I really have to say, as a game developer, I really don't want the future of gaming to be on the web. This is more than just Javascript hate. It's hard to monetize games if you aren't going free to play with microtransactions. And really, on a personal level, I just like downloading games and playing them offli…
You don't have to use JavaScript. (See emscripten, binaryen etc.) The Web is basically just a runtime you don't have to host your files on a server if you don't want. You can distribute them via CDs if you prefer. Also you can use Service Workers now. That said monetisation all depends on the product not the medium. Just look at Minecraft. It didn't use ads or microtransactions and yet it was run from a Java applet i…
Framerates aren't the same, memory usage isn't the same, and you can't easily tweak these things once they've come out the other end. The web _isn't_ just a runtime. It's abstracted like that, but browsers are glorified HTML renders with JavaScript bindings, event handling, and sound and video playback to game developers.
HN has a subset of the community constantly raving about these things for game developers, but where are the game developers actually praising these things? I don't know of any, personally. We're all too busy with desktop games.
This release seems to help on the UX side of things regarding logins, along with improved efficiency. Some of the highlights: * Users can view passwords in the save password prompt before saving them * Firefox will save passwords even in forms that do not have “submit” events * A warning is displayed when a login page does not have a secure connection * Improved video performance for users without GPU acceleration fo…
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/Releases/51#Chan... (e.g. JS/CSS api changes).
Aside; the FF dev release notes always impress upon me the scale of modern browsers. There's just so much new stuff, and lots of it isn't trivial at all, and that's despite the rather rapid release calendar, and the need to be pretty much rock solid on a huge variety of systems, and the list of tricky non-functional aspects like perf, size, security, maintainability, etc. that all this code needs to at least consider. It's daunting.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
FWIW, Service Workers allow content to be downloaded in the background and to be made offline. Mainstream gaming will never catch on the Web. But Mozilla is working on WebVR to create an open and distributed platform for VR ( https://mozvr.com ). You'll be able to publish VR content in seconds and traverse from world to world. WebGL2 is exciting for that space.
Service Workers allow content to be downloaded in the background and to be made offline. In practice, service workers seem to mostly be drive-by installs of forms of hostile code. Look at "about:serviceworkers" in Firefox to see what's running. Did you ask for any of those? I have, excluding sites where I have a login: * https://www.youtube.com , https://plus.google.com I've never signed into Youtube, or Google, on t…
The password warning is a great move by Mozilla. They tackle a very common misconception: Many people think it's enough to transfer the password encrypted, because they think https is only about secrecy. But it's crucial to also submit the form via https, otherwise attackers can mess with the form itself. A lot of webpages will be surprised by this, there are still quite a few who have insecure login forms.