WebXR, BCD, and Firefox Reality

MDN
#1

I’ve got a conundrum. We do not have WebXR support in standard desktop or mobile builds of Firefox. It is, however, available in Firefox Reality. But we don’t have an entry for that in BCD, and I don’t think it is in a position to warrant having one.

So how do I indicate that there are in fact ways to experiment with WebXR? Right now, the compat tables are all “no” across the board, but that’s not an entirely accurate portrayal of reality. It’s available in Chrome Canary builds if you enable it with flags, and there’s Firefox Reality of course.

@jmedley: What do you guys at Google think in terms of how or if to express the ability to experiment with WebXR in Chrome? I know as a rule you guys more or less don’t like to list something as supported until it’s actually shipped.

I’m torn on what my personal preference is here. I don’t feel like the API is stable enough to want to go and try to maintain compatibility specifics for every subfeature right now. Maybe we could add notes to the interface/dictionary level saying something like “Although unsupported in Firefox desktop and mobile, the XRFoo interface is available in Firefox Reality.” Might not be necessary at this point to go into further detail than that.

Thoughts? Other ideas? Probably would be helpful to get an opinion from @Elchi3.

Sheppy

#2

All signs point to us shipping WebXR in 79. That means enabled by default. No flags. No origin trials. The odds of that changing are slim and remote. (Please hold off on updating the compat tables. I will let you know when it is safe to do so.)

I would not presume to advise you on communicating your experimental features because aspects of experimental features are specific to each browser. For example, part of my reason for objecting to Chrome’s flags being on MDN is because of the varied and inconsistent way Chrome uses them. Remember, there is no specification anywhere that outlines how experimental feature flags are handled by browsers.

#3

Certainly
true. For your part, all I was looking for was some insight into how things were going to land on the Chrome side of implementing and documenting this API. We’ll have to sort out what we’re doing on the
Firefox side so we can label these properly.

#4

I meant to ask – I see that currently WebXR is in origin trial mode. Is there a way I can experiment with it for documentation work purposes, other than the origin trial, which may not be appropriate for this kind of scenario?

Sheppy

#5

This seems like a sensible plan to me.

#6

There is only the origin trial.

What do you mean by ‘not appropriate for this kind of scenario’?

#7

I have no idea what I meant by that. Ignore me. :slight_smile:

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