Wolvic 2024: A Year in Review

2024 has been a transformative year for Wolvic with the team accomplishing some huge milestones for the open source XR browser. Without the funding from our partners, Wolvic would not be able to progress like it has. Let’s take a look at a few of the larger things the team accomplished this year.

Chromium Backend

The team released a Chromium backend beta of Wolvic in April and rolled out v1.0 in September, available for sideloading on our downloads page. The Chromium backend offers a slew of technical advantages including performance improvements and better feature support for things like the WebXR AR module and hand-tracking to name a few.

Maintaining and supporting one web engine is a lot of work, and the Wolvic team is small, so rolling out this additional version is a huge accomplishment. Additional updates have rolled out for both Gecko and Chromium since the v1.0 launch and we’re hoping to make the Chromium backend the main release in stores starting Q2 2025.

New Devices Supported in 2024

In 2024 we added support for multiple new devices including:

• Pico Neo3
• Pico4 Ultra
• Huawei Vision Glass
• Magic Leap 2
• Meta Quest 3S

The primary drivers of which devices Wolvic is enabled on are partnerships with device manufacturers, open source contributions and install base. Device support is more than just initially enabling Wolvic on the device: it’s also making sure updates are sent to each app store or release channel across all the different marketplaces and that unique bugs are investigated. We’d like to thank those who have partnered with us in the past year to bring Wolvic to those devices.

Maintaining Wolvic Across Devices and Stores

Maintaining a single engine is already a significant challenge for a small team, but supporting Wolvic across multiple devices amplifies the workload exponentially, consuming 50% of our development time. This effort includes managing Wolvic across various app stores, addressing compatibility issues when updates disrupt functionality, and ensuring a seamless experience on each platform.

With limited resources, testing every new OS upgrade thoroughly is often a race against time, and much of our work happens behind the scenes to keep Wolvic running smoothly on an ever-growing range of devices.

Eye Tracking Support

Eye tracking support was an exciting development this year in both the Chromium and Gecko versions of Wolvic. With the addition of eye tracking, users can control the browser’s cursor by looking at what they want to interact with, making browsing more intuitive in this space.

One of the engineers working on Wolvic did a deep dive on eye tracking support. You can read it over on his blog.

Initial Augmented Reality Support

The Chromium 1.1 release brought with it initial (and long awaited) AR Support to the browser through the WebXR AR module. The team implemented it to support devices with a wide range of approaches: opaque-only blend modes (for devices like Meta Quest), headsets supporting alpha blend modes (like Pico4, Pico4U) and also devices using additive display technologies (like the MagicLeap2).

Input improvements

There has been a lot of work this year on, broadly speaking, input handling. This includes things like keyboard responsiveness and stability, auto-completion support for Latin keyboards, but also external Bluetooth keyboard support, improved system gesture detection and much more. Some keyboards are even rendered in-scene as reasonable analogues of their physical selves, with the keys present on the physical keyboard, and users are able to type physically, see their virtual hands on the virtual keyboard, and even pick it up!

Ongoing UI Updates

Throughout the year there have also been continuous UI improvements both from design and functionality perspectives. Most recently, we added a search bar for Bookmarks, History, and Downloads, allowing users to filter items as they type. We’ve also added more than 20 new beautiful virtual environments to choose from.

Additional improvements are planned in the coming months to help make Wolvic the best browser for XR experiences on the web. For example, we are also currently working on allowing windows to be positionined in more flexible ways, and adding buttons to the navigation bar to improve discoverability, and generally improving the situation with bookmarks, addons, history and downloads. We are also working on improving tabbed browsing by introducing a more familliar desktop-like tabbed interface (with both horizontal and vertical tab support).

The highlights listed here are just that, highlights. It would be a much longer post if we listed out every single improvement, enhancement and new feature released this year. If you are interested in what else was worked on, you can always check old release posts for all the details about what our engineering team has accomplished this year.

Looking ahead & the future of Wolvic

Partnerships are vital for Igalia to continue developing Wolvic as an additional browser option across the XR ecosystem. Maintaining and improving a browser is already a big task, and without continued funding, the XR ecosystem is at risk of losing Wolvic.

While our main partner is shifting gears and will continue to support an iteration of Wolvic, it will not be Wolvic on Android, so the XR Ecosystem is on the cusp of losing an evolving browser designed with XR in mind.

Browser choice in any form factor is important to ensuring a healthy ecosystem, and in such a new and evolving space, pushing the web forward in Extended Reality is more important than ever.

Building a browser from the ground up is a huge task, and if you’re a device manufacturer in the XR space, providing a portal to the web for your customers is key. After all, Meta reports that 50% of their customers spend their time in the browser.

Not having a browser solution is going to be a huge miss for your device experience. This is where Wolvic comes in. Partnering with Igalia to bring Wolvic to your device enables your customers to have access to the web without having to build and maintain your own solution.

If you’re interested in enabling Wolvic on your device or for any other business inquires, please get in touch to discuss potential partnership opportunities. If you want to help the web progress and evolve in Extended Reality, you can also support the browser via Open Collective.