14 DAY TRIAL // The Unity game engine has been growing steadily over the past couple of years, and more companies are adopting it for their projects. A new partnership between Mozilla and Unity will ensure that Unity-powered games are capable of running inside a browser.
Mozilla has been developing and promoting a new technology called WebGL that is in fact a Web graphics library and asm.js, which are part of JavaScript. In theory, it's possible to get a large number of games to run inside the browser without any major problems.
There are some limitations, of course, but the technology is still young and a lot of work still needs to be done. This is where partnerships like the one between Mozilla and Unity can be very beneficial.
Until now, if you wanted to play a Unity-powered game inside Firefox, you had to install an add-on developed by Unity specifically for this task. Most of the time the games would work, but not working natively inside the browser took its toll on the general performance.
“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. This development unlocks the full potential of the Web for Unity developers,” said Vlad Vukicevic, engineering director at Mozilla and inventor of WebGL.
This means that the Unity developers are working hard to implement the WebGL add-on into the upcoming Unity 5.0, which is expected to arrive later this year. This would allow for developers to export their games and make them compatible with Firefox and all other browsers that will support WebGL in the future.
What does it mean for Linux users? Mozilla hasn't said anything specifically about the Linux platform, but they don't actually have to. Unity is already capable of exporting games ready to be played on Linux, so this integration with Mozilla's WebGL is actually good news.
As it stands right now, the Linux users can't play Unity-based games in the Firefox browser, like the Windows users for example. The Unity Firefox add-on doesn't work on the Linux platform, and with this partnership announced by Unity and Mozilla it's very likely that it never will.
That being said, don't hold your breath for new amazing games ready to be played on Firefox for Linux too soon. The developers need to provide their games with the necessary support and that will only happen after the new Unity 5.0 is released.
