Mozilla and Unity team up for exporting games to WebGL

Mozilla and Unity have teamed up to create a new WebGL export option for the upcoming Unity 5.0 release of the popular gaming engine.

With a combination of WebGL and asm.js, an optimised JavaScript subset, Mozilla is claiming "near-native" performance in its demo of Dead Trigger 2.

"Unity is one of the most innovative companies in gaming, so their commitment to WebGL and asm.js really strengthens support for Mozilla's vision of a high-performance, plugin-free web," said Vlad Vukicevic, engineering director at Mozilla and inventor of WebGL.

A number of games already exist that use the Unity Web Player plugin, but Mozilla says the new, plugin-free model will increase the number of users for online games.

"Using open web technologies also provides an easier path to publish and update games over multiple platforms and test new features," the company said in a blog post.

Mozilla is currently determined to see the end of browser plugins, with the browser maker giving authors of Firefox plugins until the end of this month to apply to have their plugin whitelisted, or fall under a click-to-play plugin model.

Coinciding with its Unity announcement today, Mozilla released version 28 of its Firefox browser.

Among the new features in this release are VP9 video decoding, audio controls for HTML5 audio and video, and the resolving of a number of security issues.

Completing a trio of announcements, in order to help developers debug WebGL or 2D canvas content, Mozilla today outlined its new Canvas Debugger tool that is set to appear in Firefox Nightly releases soon.

Currently, the debugger allows developers to inspect method calls made on canvas content, and provides a timeline that gives an overview of the drawing process.

In the future, it is intended that the tool will gain the ability to inspect context state at each method call, measure time spent in each draw dell, and inspect hit regions.