Posted in: Games, Video Games | Tagged: gaming, Mozilla, PC gaming

Mozilla Plans To Take Gaming To Your Browser And Then Eventually Your Smartphone

Mozilla's new program WebAssembly aims to take your gaming from in-application to a browser while retaining high-fidelity grahpics. Sounds like a pipe-dream right? High-res 3D Graphics on a browser game interface? Not ever happening.

Well too bad fellow nay-sayers, Mozilla is hoping WebAssembly proves us all wrong. WebAssembly is part of Mozilla's Firefox browser that, according to Engadget is "a new technology that enables high-resource apps like games, computer-aided design, video and image editing and scientific visualization to run in a browser almost as fast as they do on your local computer. It will also speed up existing web apps that use JavaScript."

So, theoretically, you'd be able to run games through Firefox instead of as an application. Because it would be running through WebAssembly the games or CAD programs would run the same way regardless of platform or OS. Which, as a frequent Mac user and also gamer, would be goddamn awesome. Being able to run "windows-only" programs off my mac without needing to partition my harddrive or VM into a Windows OS would be fantastic.

WebAssembly also means that, theoretically, you can run those games and CAD applications through other smart-devices. Like your phone or tablet.

Referring back to Engadget, WebAssembly "is a low-level programming language that allows other, higher-level computer languages like C or C++ to run in a web browser. WebAssembly apps are parsed and compiled before they even hit your browser, which means that much of the heavy lifting has already been done. By comparison, a javascript app often pulls a bunch of code into the browser, then figures out how best to run it on your system, slowing the whole process down. Google and Microsoft's browsers will supportWebAssembly, though Firefox is the first browser to include the technology, thanks to Mozilla's lead role in the research."

So you may want to keep your eyes peeled for more news on WebAssembly.

If I'm reading the Engadget article correctly, WebAssembly should be available for beta testing in the new Firefox beta made available today.

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