At Mozilla, we work to move the Web forward as the platform for creating and consuming great experiences. Recently, we’ve focused on making the Web capable to deliver the most powerful desktop applications possible and awesome gaming experiences to as many people as possible.

Today, the Web received a major boost with this announcement from Amazon and OTOY. As part of this, Mozilla, OTOY and Autodesk, worked to develop ORBX.js, a pure JavaScript framework to make the Web the standard for consuming high-performance cloud graphics. Combining all these technology advances means that for the first time, Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers will be able to use the power of graphics processing in the Cloud and OTOY’s ORBX.js streaming technology to deliver high performance games and desktop applications to the Web – using only HTML5 and JavaScript.

Graphic design engineers and gamers can now enjoy the flexibility of picking up their work or games anywhere they have access to any HTML5-enabled browser without having to worry about performance or plugins. This video demo shows what great Web-based gaming experiences look like in Firefox: Autodesk will also leverage this technology to make sophisticated 3D design and engineering applications such as 3DS Max, Autodesk Maya, Autodesk Revit and Autodesk Inventor software available through any HTLM5-enabled Web browser. This is what executives from Mozilla, Amazon, Autodesk and NVIDIA had to say about the announcement: “Mozilla’s mission of making the Web the leading platform for the greatest number of users and developers today hit a major milestone,” said Brendan Eich, Mozilla Chief Technology Officer and creator of JavaScript. “With JavaScript performance now rivaling that of safe native code, thanks to Mozilla-pioneered technology such as asm.js and WebGL, the innovative approach used in OTOY’s ORBX.js now makes it possible to run powerful native apps from any popular OS through a modern browser. This robust commercial solution for running high performance games and desktop applications on the Web without plugins, demonstrates the power of the Web as a platform for software development and distribution.” “As we launched our latest Amazon EC2 instance type to bring further capabilities to our customers today, we are excited to collaborate with OTOY to extend the reach of this powerful and disruptive technology,” said Matt Wood, General Manager, Data Science at AWS. “The combination of OTOY and Amazon EC2 G2 instances provides an immediate and compelling solution for customers looking to build graphics-intensive applications on top of these instances.”

“Designers and engineers have an increasing need to be mobile, accessing the tools they need anytime, anywhere and from any device. Simple viewing and mark-up of documents is no longer sufficient – they need to be able to access powerful 3D design applications, be able to do real design work and not worry about sacrificing performance,” said Jeff Kowalski, Chief Technology Officer at Autodesk. “This is now possible with technology made possible by Autodesk, Amazon and OTOY.”