Yep, pretty sure that is what companies like Dylibso are working towards, making software into modules underpinned by plugins that are powered by WASM:

https://dylibso.com/

This is very exciting, congrats to the Firefox team!

My company is working to bring Unreal to the browser, and we've built out a custom WebGPU RHI for Unreal Engine 5.

Here are demos of the tech in action, for anyone interested:

(Will only work on Chromium-based browsers on desktop, and on some Android phones)

Cropout: https://play-dev.simplystream.com/?token=aa91857c-ab14-4c24-...

Car configurator: https://garage.cjponyparts.com/

> (Will only work on Chromium-based browsers on desktop, and on some Android phones)

This post is about WebGPU in Firefox. Do you plan to test and/or release a Firefox-compatible version?

Is it possible that this is just that Firefox hasn't shipped yet and it's already spec compatible and just requires Firefox to match the spec?

On Firefox 142 (nightly):

Cropout: After being stuck at 0% for a long while and 1200 network requests, it loads to a menu with a black background and will start a game but only UI elements show up. Seems to have a lot of errors parsing shaders, as well as a few other miscellaneous errors.

Car configurator: Several errors while at 0% (never loads), the first among them being `[223402304]: MessageBox type 0 Caption Message Text Game files required to initialize the global shader and cooked content are most likely missing. Refer to Engine log for details.`

I would concur with others that you should at least test this in Firefox before advertising it here.

In Google Chrome for macOS: 0%, and not moving, on the first link, and stops in 98% (sometimes in 97%) in the second one. Same with Safari.

IMO This is why Unreal (and Unity) for web is just not a good fit. Most games made in those engines use 100s of megs of assets. You download the 100-500meg file, to your hard drive, then run the game. That's not the web.

To be good on the web requires designing your game to start immediately with the minimal amount of downloaded. Maybe stream some stuff in the background but be playable immediately. AFAICT neither Unreal nor Unity do that by default. You can maybe coerce them to do it but most devs don't. As such they get these bad experiences when they try to put their creation on the web

Sorry to hear that! I will say that usually if you wait long enough, it will eventually load. Try popping open your dev console sidebar, you should see assets downloading over the network.

If it does crash, you'll be able to see why. I'd be interested in seeing any bug reports if you do fine some, we're always squashing bugs over here!

Can you try this one instead? No loading bar, but it should actually load and relatively fast.

https://topdown.tiwsamples.com/

It works in Chromium on MacOS, but I'm not a fan of the FF VI music rip off (Terra's theme: https://youtu.be/GxLbTAA6gK0?t=11).

Impressive, that works!

Thanks! Believe it or not, that demo is actually WebGL 2.0

Will it work in Firefox 141 on Windows? If not, why?

I keep seeing these posts and they never work on hardware that I actually own.

Are we supposed to try them out on the same kind of high end gamer desktop setup requirements for the native version?

What kind of hardware do you own?

Android Chrome on Pixel 7a: "cropout" just shows 0 % loading bar2, "car configurator" has loading bar go up to 97 or 98 %, but then also doesn't continue.

Same on Firefox on Linux (Gentoo), same percentages.

Linux doesn't have WebGPU support yet, that would be the reason.

That's true, but it should detect it and display a message that says there is no WebGPU support. The loading bar makes it seem like it will eventually load.

> My company is working to bring Unreal to the browser

you work in Epic Games?

No we are not affiliated, we are a startup working on this ourselves.

Here's an Unreal Engine 5 WebGPU demo: https://garage.cjponyparts.com/

Gets stuck at 98% on initial load screen in Firefox, Safari and Chrome (all on MacOS).

Same. Still downloading big data, though.

Nope: wasn't patient enough. After about five minutes, started working (slowly).

How is this reminiscent? And can you point to any articles, comments on forums, anything that backs up this point of view?

Blog posts in the form of "Here are the technologies making it possible to bring modern native gaming to the web" have been around for a long time, and that's probably the sort of thing they're referring to.

One that comes to mind as particularly memorable is the asm.js Citadel demo (some info here: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-and-epic-preview...), although there was a similar one a year earlier about UE3 (https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/mozilla-is-unlo...).

In 2015, Unity 5 was released with WebGL support. Engine support for having the Web as a target certainly led to a lot of excitement among gamers at the time too.

Deepseek R1 just got ported to WebGPU as well! Exciting future for local web AI:

Thread - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42795782

Yes, we do plan to add it soon, we are focusing on something cool right now! Stay tuned!

Agree that there will be a revitalization of web gaming, here's a demo of Unreal Engine 5 running in WebGPU: (only runs on Windows atm)

https://play.spacelancers.com/

It is available in a browser, the demo at least:

https://www.gamepix.com/play/rum-and-gun

That's because WebGPU support hasn't officially shipped on Linux yet.

Unity just announced today via their forums that they've officially added experimental support for WebGPU in their newest 6.1 release:

https://discussions.unity.com/t/webgpu-support-in-unity-6-1/...