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Mozilla

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Mozilla
Information
Type Nonprofit organization
Industry Internet software
Founded 1998 (Mozilla project); 2003 (Mozilla Foundation); 2005 (Mozilla Corporation)
Notable Personnel Anthony Enzor-DeMeo (CEO of Mozilla Corporation, from December 2025)
Products Firefox; former XR projects include Firefox Reality, Hubs, A-Frame and WebXR Viewer
Website https://www.mozilla.org


Mozilla is the family of organizations behind the Firefox web browser, made up of the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation and its wholly owned subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation, along with several smaller affiliated entities.[1][2] In virtual and augmented reality, Mozilla is known for starting the WebVR effort in 2014, which set out to let web pages drive VR headsets directly from the browser.[3][4] Its VR and mixed reality teams later produced the A-Frame framework, the Firefox Reality browser for standalone headsets, the Hubs social VR platform and the WebXR Viewer for iOS, and contributed to the W3C WebXR Device API that replaced WebVR.[5][6]

Mozilla wound down most of this work after layoffs in August 2020. It handed Firefox Reality to the company Igalia in February 2022, where it continues as the Wolvic browser, and it ended its hosted Hubs service on 31 May 2024, after which the Hubs code passed to the community-run Hubs Foundation.[7][8]

Reviewed 27 September 2026. Checked the corporate history, leadership, WebVR, MozVR, A-Frame, Firefox Reality/Wolvic, Hubs, WebXR Viewer and 2020 layoff facts against the cited Mozilla, W3C, MDN, Igalia and press sources. About review dates.

History

The Mozilla project began in 1998, when Netscape released the source code of its browser suite. The Mozilla Foundation was set up in 2003 as an independent nonprofit, and Firefox 1.0 followed in 2004.[9] On 3 August 2005 the foundation created the Mozilla Corporation as a wholly owned subsidiary to handle product development, marketing and distribution, with Mitchell Baker as its president and Brendan Eich as chief technical officer, while the foundation kept governance of the project and its source code.[10] Mozilla describes the corporation as a "wholly owned taxable subsidiary that serves the non-profit, public benefit goals of its parent."[2]

Besides the foundation and the corporation, the Mozilla family now includes MZLA (which makes Thunderbird), Mozilla Ventures, Mozilla.ai and the Mozilla Data Collective.[1] In February 2024 Mitchell Baker stepped down as CEO of the Mozilla Corporation, and Laura Chambers, a board member since 2021, became interim CEO.[11] Anthony Enzor-DeMeo, previously general manager of Firefox, became CEO of Mozilla Corporation on 16 December 2025.[12][13]

Mozilla's graphics work predates its VR projects. WebGL, the browser 3D graphics API that WebVR and WebXR content is drawn with, grew out of the Canvas 3D extension written by Mozilla engineer Vladimir Vukićević, who later announced Mozilla's first VR work in Firefox.[14][4]

XR work

WebVR and MozVR (2014-2016)

In mid-2014 Vukićević, then Mozilla's director of engineering, announced that Firefox developers were adding support for VR devices such as the Oculus Rift to experimental builds, so that web developers could start adding VR to their sites. The stated goals included rendering WebGL canvas, 3D video and HTML content to a headset, reading orientation and position sensors, and keeping latency low. The VR code was not yet part of the main Firefox source tree.[4] The first VR-enabled Firefox builds appeared in June 2014.[15]

To mark Firefox's 10th anniversary in November 2014, Mozilla launched MozVR, a website of experimental web VR demos with code, tools and tutorials on GitHub. Viewing it required a VR-enabled Firefox build and an Oculus Rift development kit. The launch demos included a flight over the British Columbia coast and a trip to the Arctic, and Mozilla said it intended to become "device agnostic towards VR headsets" over time.[15] In a June 2015 guest article for Road to VR, Vukićević and MozVR user experience lead Josh Carpenter said the first WebVR specification draft had been published by developers from both the Firefox and Chrome teams, and that the APIs were available in Firefox Nightly and experimental Chrome builds.[16]

On 1 March 2016 Mozilla's VR team announced version 1.0 of the WebVR API proposal, developed with Brandon Jones of the Google Chrome team. Other contributors to the specification included Chris Van Wiemeersch and Kearwood "Kip" Gilbert of Mozilla and Justin Rogers of Microsoft. Version 1.0 added VR-specific rendering and display handling, navigation between WebVR pages, and enumeration of input devices including six-degrees-of-freedom motion controllers, for both seated and standing use on desktop and mobile.[17]

A-Frame

On 16 December 2015 the MozVR team released A-Frame, an open-source library that lets web developers build VR scenes with HTML markup rather than writing WebGL code by hand. At launch it worked with the Oculus Rift DK2, Google Cardboard viewers on Android and iOS, and ordinary desktop and phone browsers without a headset. Carpenter, the team's product design lead, said the problem it addressed was that "it's way too hard to create WebVR experiences."[18]

WebVR in Firefox

Firefox 55, released on 8 August 2017, turned WebVR on by default for Windows users, with macOS support then limited to Nightly builds. Mozilla called it "the first desktop browser to support the new WebVR standard" and named the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift as supported headsets.[3] After WebVR was superseded by WebXR, Firefox 98 (8 March 2022) disabled the deprecated WebVR API by default on all builds; it had been enabled on Windows, macOS and Nightly builds before that and can still be switched on through the dom.vr.enabled preference.[19] The desktop and Android versions of Firefox never shipped the replacement WebXR Device API; MDN's browser compatibility data still lists Firefox as unsupported for it.[20]

Hubs

Mozilla introduced Hubs on 26 April 2018 as an early preview of a social VR space that runs in the browser: a user creates a room with one click and shares it as a link, with no app store or install step. Mozilla said it worked on the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Daydream and Cardboard viewers as well as on desktop and mobile devices without a headset, that it was built on WebVR and WebXR, and that its code was open source.[21] The team also built Spoke, a browser-based 3D modeling tool.[5]

On 29 April 2020 Mozilla launched Hubs Cloud in early access, a self-hosted version that organizations could run on Amazon Web Services under their own domain, offered in Personal and Enterprise editions.[22] Hubs was the only part of the mixed reality program kept after the 2020 layoffs.[5]

In February 2024 Mozilla announced that Hubs would shut down as part of an organization-wide restructuring. New subscriptions stopped on 1 March 2024, a tool for downloading user data followed on 1 April, and development ended on 31 May 2024.[23] Over its six years Hubs had hosted 115,732 custom avatars, 215,923 scenes and about 10 million attendees at meetups, according to figures reported at the time.[24] Mozilla's demo server at hubs.mozilla.com, its managed subscription and the creation of new Hubs Cloud instances all ended, and the codebase passed to the Hubs Foundation, a community organization that continues to release the self-hosted Hubs Community Edition.[8][25]

Firefox Reality

Firefox Reality, a browser designed for standalone headsets, launched on 18 September 2018 in the Oculus store (for the Oculus Go), on Daydream and on Viveport for devices running Vive Wave. It used the mobile version of Mozilla's Quantum engine and offered voice search and a home feed of curated immersive content. Andre Vrignaud, Mozilla's head of mixed reality platform strategy, said of the design: "We had to rethink everything, including navigation, text-input, environments, search and more."[26] It was later also offered in the Pico and HoloLens app stores.[27]

On 3 February 2022 Mozilla announced that it was passing the Firefox Reality technology to Igalia and would remove the browser from app stores within weeks.[7] Igalia released the successor, Wolvic, built from the Firefox Reality source code, with an initial focus on standalone XR systems based on the Android Open Source Project and HarmonyOS tethered systems, including Oculus, Huawei VR Glass, HTC Vive Focus, Pico Interactive and Lynx devices.[7][28][27]

WebXR Viewer and WebXR standardization

In 2017 Mozilla released WebXR Viewer, a developer tool for iOS that combined Apple's ARKit tracking with an early version of the WebXR standard, so that web-based AR and VR content could be tested on iPhones and iPads. Version 2.0, released in June 2020, was a rewrite based on the Firefox for iOS code.[29]

Mozilla staff also worked on the standard itself. Manish Goregaokar, one of the current editors of the W3C WebXR Device API, was affiliated with Mozilla until 2020, according to the specification's editor list.[6]

2020 layoffs

On 11 August 2020 Mozilla laid off about 250 employees, citing revenue lost to the COVID-19 pandemic. The cuts closed the team behind most of its web XR work, which had built A-Frame, WebVR and WebXR support in Firefox, WebXR Viewer, Firefox Reality, Hubs and Spoke. Only Hubs was kept, placed in a new product organization alongside Pocket, Mozilla VPN and WebAssembly.[5][30]

Products

Project Type Launched Status (September 2026)
WebVR Browser API for VR headsets Experimental Firefox builds, June 2014; 1.0 proposal, March 2016 Superseded by WebXR; disabled by default in Firefox 98 (March 2022)[15][17][19]
MozVR Web VR showcase site November 2014 Experimental project from the WebVR era[15]
A-Frame Open-source web VR framework 16 December 2015 Open source; its Mozilla team closed in August 2020[18][5]
Hubs Browser-based Social VR platform Preview, 26 April 2018 Mozilla service ended 31 May 2024; code maintained by the Hubs Foundation[21][8]
Firefox Reality Browser for standalone VR and AR headsets 18 September 2018 Transferred to Igalia in February 2022; continued as Wolvic[26][7]
WebXR Viewer iOS AR developer browser 2017; version 2.0 in June 2020 Developed by Mozilla's XR team, closed in August 2020[29][5]
Hubs Cloud Self-hosted Hubs on AWS Early access, April 2020 Retired with the end of Mozilla Hubs[22][8]

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 "About Mozilla". Mozilla. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 "About the Mozilla Corporation". Mozilla. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/moco/. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Dan Callahan (2017-08-08). "Firefox 55: first desktop browser to support WebVR". Mozilla Hacks. https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/08/firefox-55-supports-webvr/. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Joe Casad (2014-07-01). "Firefox Steps into 3D". Linux Magazine. https://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/News/Firefox-Steps-into-3D. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 Ben Lang (2020-08-12). "Mozilla is Shuttering its XR Team Amidst Major Layoff, But 'Hubs' Will Continue". Road to VR. https://roadtovr.com/mozilla-is-shuttering-its-xr-team-amidst-layoffs-but-hubs-will-continue/. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 "WebXR Device API". W3C. 2026-06-09. https://www.w3.org/TR/webxr/. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 "Update on Firefox Reality". The Mozilla Blog. 2022-02-03. https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/news/update-on-firefox-reality/. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 8.3 "End of support for Mozilla Hubs". Mozilla Support. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/end-support-mozilla-hubs. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  9. ↑ "History of the Mozilla Project". Mozilla. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/history/. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  10. ↑ "Mozilla Foundation forms new organization to further the creation of free, open source internet software, including the award-winning Mozilla Firefox browser". Mozilla Press Center. 2005-08-03. https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2005/08/mozilla-foundation-forms-new-organization-to-further-the-creation-of-free-open-source-internet-software-including-the-award-winning-mozilla-firefox-browser/. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  11. ↑ Thomas Claburn (2024-02-09). "Mitchell Baker logs off for good as CEO of Firefox maker Mozilla". The Register. https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/09/mozilla_ceo_mitchell_baker_departs/. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  12. ↑ Anthony Enzor-DeMeo (2025-12-16). "Mozilla's next chapter: Building the world's most trusted software company". The Mozilla Blog. https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/leadership/mozillas-next-chapter-anthony-enzor-demeo-new-ceo/. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  13. ↑ Ram Iyer (2025-12-17). "Mozilla's new CEO says AI is coming to Firefox, but will remain a choice". TechCrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/17/mozillas-new-ceo-says-ai-is-coming-to-firefox-but-will-remain-a-choice/. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  14. ↑ "Interview with Vladimir Vukicevic on Firefox and WebGL". Khronos Group. 2010-04-07. https://www.khronos.org/news/permalink/interview-with-vladimir-vukicevic-on-firefox-and-webgl. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  15. ↑ 15.0 15.1 15.2 15.3 Ian Paul (2014-11-12). "Mozilla's MozVR brings virtual reality to the web". PCWorld. https://www.pcworld.com/article/436339/mozillas-mozvr-brings-virtual-reality-to-the-web.html. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  16. ↑ Vladimir Vukicevic, Josh Carpenter (2015-06-09). "How Mozilla Plans to Build VR Into the Foundation of the Web". Road to VR. https://www.roadtovr.com/mozilla-build-vr-foundation-web-firefox-virtual-reality-oculus-rift/. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  17. ↑ 17.0 17.1 Casey Yee (2016-03-01). "Introducing the WebVR 1.0 API Proposal". Mozilla Hacks. https://hacks.mozilla.org/2016/03/introducing-the-webvr-1-0-api-proposal/. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  18. ↑ 18.0 18.1 Ben Lang (2015-12-16). "Mozilla Launches A-Frame: VR-capable Websites Starting with One Line of Code". Road to VR. https://roadtovr.com/mozilla-a-frame-webvr-virtual-reality-website-web-development/. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  19. ↑ 19.0 19.1 "Firefox 98 for developers". MDN Web Docs. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/Releases/98. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  20. ↑ "browser-compat-data: api/XRSystem.json". MDN browser-compat-data on GitHub. https://github.com/mdn/browser-compat-data/blob/main/api/XRSystem.json. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  21. ↑ 21.0 21.1 Sean White (2018-04-26). "Enabling Social Experiences Using Mixed Reality and the Open Web". The Mozilla Blog. https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2018/04/26/enabling-social-experiences-using-mixed-reality-and-the-open-web/. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  22. ↑ 22.0 22.1 Ben Lang (2020-04-29). "Mozilla Launches 'Hubs Cloud' on AWS, the 'Wordpress of Social Virtual Spaces'". Road to VR. https://roadtovr.com/mozilla-hubs-cloud-launch-wordpress-social-virtual-spaces/. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  23. ↑ Scott Hayden (2024-02-20). "Mozilla is Shutting Down Development on WebXR Social App 'Hubs'". Road to VR. https://roadtovr.com/mozilla-hubs-shutdown-web-xr/. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  24. ↑ Ian Hamilton (2024-02-16). "Mozilla Hubs Is Shutting Down, Will Be Handed Off To The Community". UploadVR. https://www.uploadvr.com/mozilla-hubs-shutdown/. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  25. ↑ "Hubs Foundation". Hubs Foundation. https://hubsfoundation.org/. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  26. ↑ 26.0 26.1 Sean White (2018-09-18). "Explore the immersive web with Firefox Reality. Now available for Viveport, Oculus, and Daydream". The Mozilla Blog. https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/firefox-reality-now-available/. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  27. ↑ 27.0 27.1 Sarah Perez (2022-02-03). "Mozilla is shutting down its VR web browser, Firefox Reality". TechCrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2022/02/03/mozilla-is-shutting-down-its-vr-web-browser-firefox-reality/. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  28. ↑ "Introducing Wolvic". Igalia. 2022-02-03. https://www.igalia.com/2022/02/03/Introducing-Wolvic.html. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  29. ↑ 29.0 29.1 Ben Lang (2020-06-08). "Mozilla Releases Firefox-based 'WebXR Viewer' App for Browser-based AR on iOS". Road to VR. https://roadtovr.com/mozilla-webxr-viewer-2-0-firefox-ios-ar/. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
  30. ↑ Ian Hamilton (2020-08-11). "Mozilla Lays Off 250 People, Teams Working On XR-Related Projects Affected". UploadVR. https://www.uploadvr.com/mozilla-layoffs-vr-ar/. Retrieved 2026-09-27.
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