Mozilla Hacks

Firefox 4 Demos: More 3D!

By Paul Rouget

Posted on March 25, 2011 in Featured Article, Featured Demo, Firefox, and WebGL

Firefox 4 is here! Yeah!

webgl logoAnd to celebrate the launch, we have released another round of demos on Web O’ Wonder, with 3 awesome WebGL demos! (This new round also introduces mobile-specific demos, see this dedicated blog post).

WebGL: It’s 3D and Web Content together.

Demo by Cédric Pinson and Guillaume Lecollinet.

GlobeTweeter is a perfect example of how you can mix 3D and Web Content. In this page, you can see real-time geo-located twitter activity represented on the planet earth.

WebGL animations

Demo by The Audio Team.

No-Comply is a WebGL animation. With JägerMonkey (Firefox’s new JavaScript engine) and the experimental animation scheduler (mozRequestAnimationFrame), we can now create complex WebGL animations.

Learn more about the no comply demo.

This demo has been developed by the audio team who has also created the Flight Of The Navigator demo, where you can find Videos and live Flickr and Twitter content in a 3D city, all build with WebGL:

About Paul Rouget

Paul is a Firefox developer.

More articles by Paul Rouget…

13 comments

  1. Mr.doob

    It’s great to see Ubuntu being used for the video :_)

    March 25th, 2011 at 18:46

  2. Robert Kaiser

    From my POV, it’s quite unfortunate that so many of our demos nowadays use WebGL, as a significant amount of Firefox users can’t use WebGL and see nothing useful there, probably thinking they haven’t got awesome technology, when the reality is that they just might have Graphics stacks we don’t support, for example an open one (Linux/Intel here, for example).

    Once we can deliver WebGL to all our users, I’ll be way happier with those WebGL things…

    March 26th, 2011 at 06:48

  3. Benoit Jacob

    @ Robert: I am working on enabling WebGL on recent (Mesa 7.10) free drivers right at the moment (bug 639842). It’s not for the fun of it that I blacklisted them in Firefox 4. It is really, really hard to distinguish good ones from bad ones without risking crashing: see that bug.

    March 26th, 2011 at 14:56

  4. Robert Kaiser

    Benoit:
    I fully know we don’t disable it for the fun of it, I intentionally didn’t go into reasons but just the sad situation we’re in in my post. It’s unfortunate that we seem to be hitting a lot of rough edges of drivers on all OSes that others might not be hitting as hard or so, but that’s the situation we’re in and unfortunately we need to deal with that by blocking those drivers completely for the moment. On the upside, it’s really cool to hear you are working on this!

    March 27th, 2011 at 13:38

  5. jmdesp

    Hi, with Firefox 4 under Windows 7/64 on a brand new Dell Optiplex 780/Radeon HD 3450, I had to force webgl with about:config webgl.force-enabled to get it.
    Did I miss something, shouldn’t I have had it activated by default ?

    March 29th, 2011 at 11:17

  6. Benoit Jacob

    @ jmdesp: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Blocklisting/Blocked_Graphics_Drivers

    March 29th, 2011 at 11:20

  7. jmdesp

    Thanks Benoit, Dell provided this brand new computer with driver version 8.680.0.0, when 8.741.0.0 is required at a minimum to unblock webgl.

    I think the user experience here is defective : IMO Firefox should bring an information bar that tells me the webpage tried to used the disabled webgl feature, and that webgl is disabled because my driver version is not up to date.

    Just similar to the way it will bring an information bar that tells me the page is trying to use geolocation and asking whether or not it should be allowed.

    March 30th, 2011 at 00:34

    1. Mark

      Well,about:support does tell you if your driver is blocked and gives a minimum driver version, but no regular user is gonna go there so it isn’t that useful.

      March 31st, 2011 at 15:27

  8. Benoit Jacob

    Noone’s really arguing against giving this information more visibility, but 1) we couldn’t do that for a long time because of the Firefox 4 string freeze; 2) the Firefox 5 checkin window is unusually short because of the transition to the new release cycle, so this can’t happen until Firefox 6 (october 2011).

    March 30th, 2011 at 04:40

  9. Webliberty

    3D acceleration sometimes slows down video, and then it sharply twitches. At me a video card weak, unfortunately. It is said that 7 version consumes less resources, can on it will better)

    July 13th, 2011 at 03:57

  10. Chico Web Design

    Firefox 4! very nice features on 3D animations.

    August 31st, 2011 at 16:51

  11. vinay

    hi all,

    I am really impressed by the webgl and that too on ubuntu just rocks. Can I any one reply me how to start?

    September 19th, 2011 at 04:17

  12. j

    No Comply now seems broken on firefox 6. THe music plays and the backgrounds are animated but there are no characters.

    September 29th, 2011 at 13:07

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