Gecko Wolvic 1.8.3 and Chromium Wolvic 1.2.3 Released

Welcome to this new release of Wolvic: today we are announcing Wolvic 1.8.3 (Gecko) and 1.2.3 (Chromium).

This new version drastically improves the accuracy of controller positioning, which means they should now pretty much exactly match their positions in the physical world. We also gave the orientation code a major overhaul. The upshot of that overhaul is that the controllers should now rotate around their axis of orientation, whatever it happens to be at any given moment, instead of always rotating around the vertical axis like they used to do.

In the Wolvic user interface, we made a bunch of tiny improvements: a visible status improvement here, some larger buttons there, a warning dialog when disabling hand tracking, updated translations in a number of languages, and more.

There were a number of VR video sites that started rejecting any browser not made by Meta, which definitely includes Wolvic. Taking a page from world of desktop browsers, Wolvic now pretends to be a different browser than it is, once again allowing users to access the sites in question.

In the Chromium version (1.2.3) of Wolvic, the “find in page” feature has been enabled, so you won’t have to scroll-and-scan any longer. Just give Wolvic the text you’re looking for, and it will find it for you.

Speaking of giving Wolvic text (or URLs or anything else), we’ve improved the stability of voice recognition and simplified some backend implementation, which should hopefully make voice input faster and more robust.

If you found things a little too bright on Pico devices, we turned the gamma value down a bit, which should make things better. We also fixed a few crashes in the Bookmarks pane that could be caused by bookmarks to pages that didn’t have titles.

Finally, we’ve added four new 3D environments, available in Settings > Environment. Our thanks to Alexander Scholten, MozillaHubs, Paul, and Jungle Jim for releasing their works under Creative Commons 2.0 licenses.

Wolvic 1.8.3/1.2.3 is available now on all supported platforms.

Gecko Wolvic 1.8.3 and Chromium Wolvic 1.2.3 Release Notes

Highlights

• Restored support for several VR video sites that started blocking non-Meta browsers such as Wolvic
• High fidelity positioning and rotation of controllers
• Fixed a few crashes in bookmarks pane and refresh rate selection code
• Tons of little UI adjustments and enhancements
• Find in page in Chromium version
• New environments

Web Content

• Make VR videos available in some sites. They recently started to filter out non-Meta browsers, so we have to spoof the user agent to pretend to be another VR browser.

UI Improvements

• Set the pressed status for the Settings button in the tray when clicked
• Added a delay when switching windows in hover-to-focus mode to avoid glitches
• Use the orientation of the focused controller to move windows
• Show a warning when disabling hand tracking to notify users that it will be reset on next launch
• Keyboard layout update, larger buttons for voice and close actions and theming improvements
• Horizontal scrolling behaviour now matches vertical’s
• Do not show “Find in Page” option for the start page
• Added 4 new environments
• Updated translations: gl, ru, fr, es, uk, pt…

Usability

• Drastically improved the accuracy of controllers position, they almost completely match their real world position
• Revamped the controllers’ orientation code, they properly rotate now around their rotation axis (whatever it is) instead of always rotating around the bottom

Privacy & Security

• Show the Enhanced Tracking Protection widget when clicking on the Advanced button
• Harness the refresh rate selection code to prevent crashes with some runtimes

Voice Search

• Improved stability of voice recognition by adding extra status checks
• Simplified VoiceSearchWidget implementation. Also improved responses to state changes

Chromium

• Added find-in-page support

Stability

• Fixed a crash in bookmarks view caused by bookmarks with no title

Pico

• Fixed WebXR gamma (content too bright) in Pico devices by adding a specific shader for the blitter

Other

• Moved Openxr layer support detection to the backend avoiding hardcoding it in the app
• Improvements and fixes for the build system
• Added new manifest permission strings for hand tracking for Meta’s HorizonOS