Firefox Reality

» see mixedreality.mozilla.org/firefox-reality as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

firefox reality never really reached me. it was a us-coded product running on hardware i did not own, made for a category i was watching from the outside. by 2018 i was using firefox on a desktop linux box and an android phone, not on an oculus go. the closest i ever got to webxr was an a-frame demo someone linked me on twitter that locked up the tab. that was a fair preview of what the category felt like in those years.

mozilla shipped firefox reality on september 18 2018 for the oculus go and the viveport headset, with android support so you could side-load on samsung gear vr. the browser was a fork of geckoview, the embeddable mobile firefox engine, with a controller-driven ui designed around hand pointers. you could pull up a url, do a search, watch youtube, walk around a 360 video. the pitch was that the open web deserved a real first-party browser inside the headset, the same way it had ones inside the desktop and the phone.

that argument made sense and the product never landed. by 2020 quest had eaten the rest of the consumer headset market and meta shipped its own browser as the default. mozilla added quest support, then pico, then huawei vr glass, then hololens. install counts never grew enough to move the strategy meeting. on february 3 2022 mozilla announced the retirement, said it does not always host the technologies it incubates, and pointed users at igalia.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it actually was ~

firefox reality was a normal browser engine wearing a vr ui. the address bar floated in space, the tabs sat above the page like a hud, the keyboard came up as a 3d plane you typed at with controller rays. youtube and vimeo videos played in 360 if the source was tagged, otherwise they ran on a flat panel you could pin to a wall. the engineering was good. the cultural problem was that web browsing was the last thing anyone wanted to do inside a headset, the killer apps were games and watch parties.

mozilla also shipped a separate fork called firefox reality pc preview for pc-tethered headsets running steamvr, which never left preview. the consumer story stayed on the standalone headset side. by 2021 mozilla had cut most of the mixed reality team in the big restructuring, and the project was being maintained at half-speed by a small group inside the larger geckoview org.

~ how it ended ~

the shutdown announcement landed clean. mozilla pulled the apps from the oculus store, viveport, and the pico store across the following weeks. existing installs kept working until the app stores stopped distributing updates. the source code, which had been on github under an mpl license the whole time, was forked by igalia, the spanish free-software consultancy that already shipped browser work for sony and others.

~ the inheritance ~

igalia released wolvic on february 10 2022, seven days after the firefox reality retirement, and it has been the public successor since. wolvic supports the same headset lineup plus a few that firefox reality never reached. the open-source license made the handoff frictionless in a way most browser shutdowns never get. the firefox reality codebase has lived longer than the brand by some margin.

mozilla's broader xr program did not survive the wave. hubs lasted another two years before its own retirement in may 2024. the immersive web working group at the w3c, which mozilla helped seed, kept going with chrome and oculus engineers carrying the weight. that is the better outcome than the browser itself: the standards stayed open even after the mozilla-shaped browser that pushed them shipped its last update.

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