The Mozilla Foundation has just drawn a line under its Firefox Reality project, a web browser, which supported virtual reality (WebVR), or augmented reality (WebAR) environments, and whose first public version dates from September 2018.
Mozilla gives no explanation for this withdrawal, but it is known that the organization has undergone several staff reductions in recent years and seeks to focus on essential projects.
Firefox Reality, which ultimately only targets a niche market, is clearly not one of them. The browser will therefore soon disappear from all application stores.
Not even dead!
But this death is at the same time a resurrection. The development of this project, in fact, is taken over by Igalia, a Spanish company specializing in free software.
Firefox Reality will be reborn, in the coming weeks, under the name “Wolvic”.
“At Igalia, we believe the web is important to the mixed reality space in many ways. XR systems, which provide an immersive operating system, need web browsers to be part of it. To step into a ‘reality’ without having access to everything that already exists on the web would be pretty terrible,” reads a blog post from Igalia.
Initially, the company will focus its efforts on software interoperability with the main headsets on the market: Oculus, Huawei, VR Glass, HTC Vive Focus, Pico Interactive, Lynx.