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What exactly are the limitations that prevent this game from working in Firefox to the point where they need a "please download Chrome" banner? Just curious, I thought WebAssembly and WebGL were pretty competitive these days.



I am also wondering. On my Firefox, it seems to run smoothly.


I completely agree - 99% of the time, I play (and test) the game on Firefox. It looks like it runs there even better than on Chromium. I've tried to tell the main developer that it 100% works, but the badge is still there; you can ignore it.


What device are you on? I have an issue which only happens on Firefox on Mac where WebRender is disabled by default, causing massive drops in FPS. I think it works fine on Windows though.


A laptop with Intel Core i5-6200U (Linux, X11).


Chrome seems to have a more full-featured shim layer for handling older graphics drivers.

I have a netbook that Firefox won't even try to launch WebGL on. Chrome seems to run WebGL just fine, though shaders with more than about twelve instructions fall off a performance cliff.

(Add one multiplication operation over the limit, and performance decreases twentyfold. Keep the new line, but delete any other single line of code in the shader, and performance goes back to normal.)


Not sure how true this is, since both Chrome and Firefox use ANGLE as their default WebGL backend (at least on Windows).

https://github.com/google/angle


I saw this behavior under Ubuntu.

Poking around the Firefox wiki, it looks like it uses it's own native backends on basically every platform except Windows.

I have no idea whether any of this is relevant to the original Firefox support issue.


That’s bananas. I write a lot of complex WebGL shaders, I had never heard that some devices have such a clear (and early) performance cliff.


If you're curious:

I don't have the machine in front of me, but it's an eee PC with I believe an Intel n550 CPU and an Intel GMA 3150 graphics chipset. I saw this behavior under a recent version of Ubuntu, probably 19.10.

(The "fast" framerate was something like one frame very 1-2 seconds, which was acceptable for running an image filter. The slow framerate was one frame every 30-40 seconds, during which Chrome locked up completely.)


I imagine it's doing the SwiftShader fallback, and the JIT tends to have a few specializations for "quick" shaders. Would be curious what's going on, though.


So what is the issue in this game? I presume the banner is there for a reason. I see a lot of complaints about it and if it really was something easily fixed someone should make a PR.


This is one issue making my WebGL app unusable in Firefox: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=925025


This game appears to be written in JS. I've been working on a browser game recently myself and there is definitely some bottlenecks when it comes JS execution in Firefox, especially on Linux.


Not sure why you're getting downvoted since it's completely true. Making a cross-browser game is hard.

For regular apps it hardly matters but when you need to run complicated logic 60 times a second differences between browsers and even nuances in implementations between platforms (Windows vs Mac, desktop vs mobile) start to matter. And then we have all the rendering and sound caveats.


FWIW I can’t for the life of me get WebGL to work on Firefox anywhere near as good as it works on Chrome. GTS 1050 on Ubuntu.


It could also be more indirect issues not necessary related to performance or rendering. Here are a couple commits for fixed issues in Firefox:

https://github.com/tobspr/shapez.io/commit/d2903f5606d285678...

https://github.com/tobspr/shapez.io/commit/bf8b3253b97fb5d10...


GTX 660 on Win10 here while running Elite Dangerous parallel to it: no issues at all.


maybe because there are a lot of google links on the page: googleoptimize googletagmanager doubleclick


ctrl+left click doesn't allow me mass select stuff. The speed doesn't seem slow at all though


Same, works fine in Safari 14.0.




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