Firefox Reality represents the Mozilla Foundation’s foray into the world of virtual reality and augmented reality with a web browser designed wholly to support those technologies.

The Mixed Reality team at Mozilla Tuesday announced the launch of the 1.0 version of Firefox Reality for public release and it’s now available for Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Google Daydream. Interested users can download the browser from the app store associated with their VR headset today.

In creating Reality, the Mozilla team tasked with its creation needed to build a whole new version of the browser from the ground up with the intent of supporting immersive 3-D experiences as a standalone feature app.

“We had to rethink everything, including navigation, text-input, environments, search and more,” Andre Vrignaud, head of mixed reality platform strategy at Mozilla, wrote in a blog post. “This required years of research, and countless conversations with users, content creators and hardware partners. The result is a browser that is built for the medium it serves.”

The Firefox Reality VR browser has been in development since before it was initially announced in April and integrates performance-enhancing upgrades added with the browser’s Quantum release last November designed for mobile.

The browser also includes features designed to make exploring VR easier for users such as the ability to search the web with voice activation – eschewing otherwise cumbersome “look and click” controls common to VR interfaces. Text input for VR headsets, especially lightweight mobile versions, can be a dreadful task because of a lack of input devices designed for that purpose. As a result, voice makes a much better interface.

The Reality team will be working with content creators from across the VR industry to help create a seamless, integrated experience from the launch of the app designed to make users feel at home.

To make the experience as fun and engaging, Mozilla is reaching out to creators of immersive content for games, videos, environments and experiences that can be accessed directly from the home screen.

“We spent a lot of time talking to early VR headset owners,” Vrignaud said. “We asked questions like: ‘What is missing?’ ‘Do you love your device?’ And ‘If not, why?’ The feedback we heard the most was that users were having a hard time finding new games and experiences. This is why we built a feed of amazing content into the home screen of Firefox Reality.”

Because this is a 1.0 release of the Firefox Reality software, it does lack some features common to standard 2-D browsers. For example, bookmarks are currently not available for creating favorite pages, but the team would like the VR-using public to know that version 1.1 is not that far off, and those features will come in a steady buildout process. In the coming months, Vringaud said, Reality will receive support for bookmarks, 360-degree video playback, multiple accounts and more.

Firefox Reality is immediately available for the major VR headsets on the market and can be downloaded for Oculus (and it supports Oculus Go) and Google Daydream (and its all-in-one devices). It is also available in the Viveport app store by searching for “Firefox Reality,” and it also supports all-in-one devices running Vive Wave.

Image: Mozilla