Mozilla is Unlocking the Power of the Web as a Platform for Gaming | The Mozilla Blog

Mozilla, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting openness, innovation and opportunity on the Web, is advancing the Web as the platform for high-end game development. With Mozilla’s latest innovations in JavaScript, game developers and publishers can now take advantage of fast performance that rivals native while leveraging scale of the Web, without the additional costs associated with third-party plugins. This allows them to distribute visually stunning and performance intensive games to billions of people more easily and cost effectively than before.

To make these advancements, Mozilla developed a highly-optimized version of JavaScript that supercharges a developer’s gaming code in the browser to enable visually compelling, fast, 3D gaming experiences on the Web. With this technology we are also opening up the path for 3D Web-based games on mobile as JavaScript performance continues to close the gap with native.

Today, we are excited to unlock this technology for high-performance games, by teaming up with Epic Games. By leveraging this new JavaScript optimization technology, Mozilla has been able to bring Epic’s Unreal Engine 3 to the Web. With this port, developers will soon be able to explore limitless possibilities when it comes to porting their popular gaming titles to the Web.

Mozilla was able to recently prove the Web is capable of being a compelling gaming platform with its BananaBread game demo, which is built using Web technologies Mozilla pioneered, including WebGL, Emscripten and now asm.js. The demo shows how high-end games can easily be ported to JavaScript and WebGL while still maintaining a highly responsive, visually compelling 3D gaming experience.

Developers wishing to test this technology can check out the latest version of BananaBread with its peer-to-peer, multiplayer WebRTC technology and JavaScript performance improvements. BananaBread works in all browsers that support WebGL.

As high-performance games on the Web move to rival native performance, Mozilla is also
opening up the path to Web-based games on mobile. We are working with premium game
publishers such as Disney, EA and ZeptoLab who are using the same technology to bring
performance optimizations to their top-rated games.

Developers can submit fun games and apps to the Firefox Marketplace now. The Firefox
Marketplace is currently available as a preview on Firefox for Android and will come to Firefox OS later this year.

If you are at GDC this week, you can check out the Unreal Engine running on Firefox at the NVIDIA booth