Mozilla is the company that created the Firefox browser. shuttered most of its web-focused XR development in 2020. The company’s social VR web app Hubs, which was launched in 2010, was spared the chop. Launched in 2018, the Hubs XR chatroom runs in a web browser and allows users to connect with VR headsets and other users of standard monitors and smartphones. It’s an impressive ‘no-install-required’ WebXR social app that never gained the sort of traction that better-backed apps garnered over the years, such as
Rec Room, VRChat, or Meta’s Horizon Worlds.The team responsible for Hubs recently announced its shutdown in
, stating that its last day under Mozilla will be on May 31st, 2024. This includes shutdown of Hubs‘ demo server, managed subscription, and community resources.a blog postThe team aims to provide a multi-month transition period leading up to shutdown of those services, starting with disabling new subscriptions on March 1st, and concluding all work on Hubs by May 31st. A tool to download user data will be released on April 1st, the company says.
While this means Mozilla won’t be continuing active development or maintenance of Hubs codebases and community resources post-shutdown, since
Hubs‘ code is open source, anyone can continue independent development. The company says that the ‘Community Edition of Hubs‘ can be run on any platform which supports Kubernetes. This includes Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.