Mozilla Firefox 22 Launched With Web Video Calls, 3D Gaming
Mozilla this week launched the latest version of its Firefox 22 browser seeking to woo users with new features including 3D gaming and video calls.
Support for video calls, voice calls and file sharing are also available without the need to install additional software or use third-party plugins.
Mozilla said it and Ericsson demonstrated this at Mobile World Congress, to show how Firefox can integrate seamlessly with a users’ mobile phone “and make voice or video calls and share files.”
Mozilla demonstrated its new 3D capabilities in a blog post, by offering first-person shooter ‘BananaBread’ in a bid to lure developers. The technologies behind Firefox 22 include WebGL, Emscripten, asm.js and WebRTC.
Mozilla has been working on integrating the WebRTC protocol, which eliminates the need for separate browser plug-ins to enable those rich functions, for some time.
And asm.js, the new JavaScript protocol, is “a supercharged subset of JavaScript” that loads quickly and enables Firefox 22 to run intense applications such as games and photo-processing in real-time without the need for plug-ins.
It’s all part of Mozilla’s plan to “unlock the power of the web.”
“Firefox allows developers to create amazing high-performance Web applications and enables video calls and file-sharing directly in the browser, all without the need for plugins or third-party software. What has been difficult to develop on the Web before is now much easier, faster and more fun,” Mozilla said.
At the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco, the companies showed off Unreal Engine 3 applications running natively in Firefox using JavaScript.
