Mozilla is working on implementing the Web Audio API in Firefox Aurora and Nightly

Jul 10, 2013 08:32 GMT  ·  By

The Web Audio API has been available in Chrome for a year, and now it is making its way into other browsers. Mozilla has been adding some support for the API and it's presently available in Firefox 24 Aurora and Firefox 25 Nightly.

The implementation is not complete, but Mozilla wants to get it done by the time Firefox 24 reaches the stable channel, for both the desktop and Android.

If the team hits a major problem, the feature may be pushed back to Firefox 25. Otherwise, it should become available to everyone by default in a little over three months.

If you're eager to try out some of the existing Web Audio API apps in Firefox you're probably out of luck. Most were built for Chrome, which supported an earlier, non-standard version of the interface.

Changes have been made to the API as it went through the standardization process. Mozilla implemented this standard version of the programming interface and AudioContext, but older apps target webkitAudioContext. Porting apps to the new API shouldn't be too hard, but they won't work as they are.

Once the standard Web Audio API is available in both Firefox and Chrome, developers will be able to do plenty of interesting things. Any app that needs precision audio playback is going to benefit. Games are the perfect example of this, but it applies to any app with sounds effects.

Music apps will finally be a reality on the web, as any music editing web app had to rely on Flash or even Java until now. Granted, Firefox doesn't yet have the OscillatorNode component of the Web Audio API, crucial for a music app.

It's not just OscillatorNode that's missing; MediaStreamAudioSourceNode, MediaElementAudioSourceNode, as well as HRTF panning for PannerNode aren't yet available either. But most, if not all, should be implemented by the time Firefox 24 hits the beta stage.