Sorry for my ambiguity here! On Linux I specifically mean OpenVR support. We're currently looking more at OpenXR as a cross-device solution rather than investing more on OSVR, though certainly if more devices that can only work on OSVR appear we could resource additional investments.

That particular work is fairly well-separated from the rest of the core of Firefox and doesn't require somebody like Kip or Daosheng with years of experience hacking on VR hardware.

Perhaps what I said was ambiguous. The error message is from the OpenVR support.

The OSVR support wouldn't have such an error message because the rendering support wasn't implemented in the first place.

I understand the reluctance to spend time investing in it, especially when developers say the OSVR-Rendermanager API and the OpenGL context sharing is awkward to use, but what's the point in investing in it in the first place, with a big announcement from Sensics http://sensics.com/osvr-comes-webvr/ etc?

The thing is, at the moment the only OpenVR implementation is the proprietary SteamVR runtime and it looks like it's unlikely that anyone will implement a FLOSS OpenVR runtime. Isn't Mozilla usually all over libre stuff like OSVR?

Not even ideologically, imagine you're buying a Talos II POWER9 Workstation, plop a Vega 64 in, compile firefox, connect your HMD, and what's that? SteamVR is only available on x86? Tough luck, no WebVR for you! Meanwhile you can compile OSVR for whatever architecture you like.

> though certainly if more devices that can only work on OSVR

There's no such thing because with SteamVR-OSVR all OSVR supported devices can be used in SteamVR (they are having some trouble with controllers, e.g. the Nolo controllers, but that's getting sorted out currently).

The point is really more that Mozilla seems to give a lot more love to proprietary platforms like windows and runtimes like steamvr now than to libre ones.

It's funny because in 2014/2015 with the Oculus Rift DK2 we first got a chromium webvr build for linux and then when it got into firefox nightly, it worked on linux too. Then Oculus stopped their linux support and both browsers stopped caring about WebVR on linux too. That announcement from Sensics is a year old and falls in the time where the OSVR SDK was the only major current and working VR SDK on Linux (and Mac OS X!) but it seems nobody wanted to make the effort to actually make it work. Fair enough, the OSVR SDK is an SDK literally nobody on Linux uses, so we could wait for SteamVR. That came out in February and today here we are, wondering what the problem is.