Announcing WebVR on Mac via Firefox Nightly

Mozilla is pleased to announce WebVR is now available for macOS today via Firefox Nightly. This follows our announcement last week that WebVR is shipping in Firefox 55 for Windows.

More than 20% of Hacks readers (on desktop) and a quarter of web developers accessing the Mozilla Developer Network are on macOS. Many developers go to great lengths to test and develop in familiar environments and platforms. Our hope with this announcement is to reduce friction and empower this community with the first wave of official VR hardware support for macOS.

Our team has worked closely with the engineers at Valve to ensure that a high-performance implementation of WebVR is available on macOS just as Valve releases SteamVR into beta for macOS.

“With the combination of SteamVR and room-scale from Valve, and WebVR in Firefox for Mac from Mozilla, developers are now able to bring their content to all three PC platforms,” said Joe Ludwig from Valve. “We look forward to seeing all the new experiences enabled by these updates.”

The cross-platform nature of web development means that all the web applications, engines, and frameworks that we mentioned in last week’s post are available today, in every WebVR capable browser. Frameworks like A-Frame (used over 10 million times a month) make it easy to build and release cross-platform VR content on the web. And with the availability of WebVR on MacOS, web developers can build and test content on their preferred platform, whether it’s Windows, MacOS, or Linux (also available!)

If you haven’t worked in Firefox Nightly yet, check out WebVR in Firefox for MacOS and discover a new world of VR on the Web with WebVR! If you run into problems, have questions, or just want to show off what you’re doing, please tweet to @MozillaVR and say hi in the WebVR Slack.

About Andre Vrignaud

Andre Vrignaud is the Head of Platform Strategy for Mozilla’s Mixed Reality Program, where he guides the strategy for Mozilla's efforts to enable an open, sustainable 3D web and ecosystem. With a side of net neutrality and privacy advocacy.

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About Kearwood (Kip) Gilbert

I hack on VR at Mozilla as a member of the Mozilla VR team, owner of Firefox's WebVR module, and a WebVR spec editor. I hail from the gaming industry, writing game engines for AAA and indie titles.

More articles by Kearwood (Kip) Gilbert…