The launch of Chrome 113 back in 2023 officially brought WebGPU support to the mainstream, allowing developers to finally have a direct line to a machine"s GPU for running some seriously intensive graphics in games or complex 3D apps right in the browser. But if you were using Firefox, at least on the stable channel, you got absolutely nothing.
Now, years later, the Mozilla GFX team has published an update, announcing that WebGPU will finally be supported in Firefox 141 when it launches on July 22nd. This initial rollout focuses only on Windows, and Mac, Linux, and Android are on the roadmap for the coming months.
The implementation rests on the WGPU crate, a Rust-based interface that translates web requests into native commands for Direct3D 12, Metal, or Vulkan, depending on the system.
For a while now, forums have been filled with users wondering why Mozilla has typically been slower when it comes to adopting these new web standards. We have seen comments on Reddit claiming this pattern was the main thing preventing them from dumping Chrome and switching to Firefox.
One Reddit user cynically claimed that the reason Firefox is slow to adopt web standards is because Mozilla "puts about 90% of income into the CEO"s salary alone instead of paying more developers." In reality, though, implementing a secure and stable graphics API is undoubtedly very complicated, which is why it took so long for the browser to catch up.
The Mozilla team notes there"s still work remaining. For instance, there is a bug related to inter-process communication overhead that will be patched in Firefox 142. They are also working on a more efficient way to track GPU task completion to reduce latency. In addition to that, the ability to directly use decoded video frames with importExternalTexture is not yet implemented.
At the time of writing, there"s a handful of other popular features missing in Firefox, like built-in support for PWAs, View Transitions API, which allows for smoother page transitions, and WebUSB, among others.