Can Firefox Become A Game Platform?

Mozilla can use all the support it can get at this point. Both Google and Microsoft are being focused on their future platforms, but there has been little reported news this week about the developer preview of Mozilla (Labs) Apps, which provides a first glimpse at Mozilla’s view of an open apps platform for the web. A detail of Mozilla Apps is an opportunity for Mozilla to follow Google into the entertainment and, specifically, in the game market.

Some thoughts of Mozilla’s path into gaming are provided by Rob Hawkes, an HTML5 programmer, who recently published notes of Firefox features that would support a focus on gaming. According to Hawkes, currently developed functionality for games would include BrowserID to identify players, the Full Screen API for a traditional gameplay experience, the Mouse Lock API to “tame” mouse pointers, the Gamepad API to support gamepads, as well as real-time multiplayer support via Web Sockets.

These features are following Google, which should be credited for kicking off the Gamepad/Joystick API standardization at the W3C (Mozilla was first to publish the idea), driving more features such as WebRTC, and is engaging some efforts to give web games more visibility via tradeshow events. Google is also looking further into supporting technologies, such as its Native Client (NaCl) which enables a path to get traditional C code to run in a browser window. Microsoft has been pursuing a similar strategy by pushing its hardware acceleration engine in IE9, which still leads Firefox and Chrome in demanding HTML5 tests such as WebViz and will be enabling Microsoft to spark the development of entertainment apps that take specific advantage of the features in IE9/10.

Despite the fact that Mozilla has been notably quieter in this arena, Firefox 4 and up has always be a very capable HTML5 browser and we even found it to be the best compromise between IE and Chrome in a review earlier this year. In fact, Mozilla may have, especially because of its open approach a massive opportunity to approach gamers. There are still 400 million Firefox users, according to Mozilla’s own claims, which is nothing to sneeze at. However, the concern is that Mozilla is losing market share, while Chrome is gaining quickly and is winning this game against its rivals. In the first half of December, Chrome has a market share of almost 27%, while IE dropped below 39%, according to StatCounter. Mozilla gained slightly to 25.5%. However, Chrome 15 has been, by far, the leading HTML5 browser with a 23% share, followed by Firefox 8 with about 15%. IE9 is at about 10.5%.

Mozilla has a clear opportunity in game applications and it may be worth a shot to go much more aggressively after this market.

Wolfgang Gruener in Business Products on December 16