Chromium Wolvic 1.4 Released

Welcome to this new release of Wolvic: today we are announcing Wolvic 1.4. This release brings major improvements to Wolvic, including:

• Engine upgrade
• Major upgrade to immersive VR videos: new projections, full SBS support, 360/180 stereo support, and 60% less memory usage
• Improved accessibility labels across settings and language dialogs
• Better window behavior
• Enabled sideloading of Lynx packages
• HTML-in-canvas support

New and Notable Features

Engine Updates

This release updates Chromium to M150. This is a significant jump, incorporating hundreds of important bug fixes and web feature updates.

Improved Video Handling

With this release, we’ve made some big changes in the realm of playing video, whether as a projection onto a surface or a fully immersive 360 degree video. This includes the addition of support for stereo 360 videos, a format that permits video to feel fully three-dimensional even as you look around. Previously, they had been rendering as “mono” views, which is to say, the same view was used for both eyes.

It’s also now the case that 180-degree videos, which project against a full hemisphere of the viewing space, are centered in front of the user instead of to one side.

We’ve made significant progress in optimizing memory usage for immersive VR videos. As an example, 4K VR content now consumes approximately 60% less memory compared to previous versions, delivering a more efficient experience without compromising quality.

We also found and fixed a memory leak that was causing memory allocation for immersive videos to grow as the user switched in and out of immersive mode, once again putting stress on the memory and the battery. The Chromium build also got a fix for the display of immersive videos, which no longer drop to the lowest possible resolution.

HTML in Canvas

A big development in the web developments world is the ability to put active DOM nodes into a <canvas> element. This permits web devs to apply pixel shaders and other real-time graphical effects to portions of a web page.

New Environments

And last, we’ve split our four new 3D environments between photographic and artistic. All are available in Settings > Environment. Our thanks to Dario Barresi, Greg Zaal, and Paul for releasing their works under Creative Commons 2.0 licenses.

Thank You!

We can’t overstate how much the community helps to make this possible. This release includes many fixes contributed by the Wolvic community. Thank you to all the great contributors that help to keep the project alive and healthy!

Changelog

Chromium v1.4

Highlights

• Fixed 360/180 stereo VR videos rendering as mono
• Added support for full-frame 3D videos and a new 360 stereo left-right projection mode
• Improved accessibility labels across settings and language dialogs
• Modified the Lynx package to allow sideloading

Engine & Platform Updates

• Migrated Chromium backend to M150
• First release using R8 for minification and optimization

VR Video & Media

• Added support for full-frame 3D videos
• Added support for vroid.com
• Centered 180-degree VR video hemispheres in front of the viewer
• Added a 360 stereo left-right video projection mode
• Fixed 360 and 180 stereo VR videos rendering as mono
• Fixed memory over-allocations in VR immersive videos
• Fixed memory leak when entering/leaving immersive VR videos
• Enabled HTML-in-Canvas support

UI

• Improved the Firefox Accounts workflow, error pages are not shown by the end of the sign in process
• Significantly improved the reliability and accuracy of the window movement code
• Removed a small window jump when grabbing the move bar
• Fixed a regression changing the window distance with controllers
• Fixed volume slider not appearing and volume keys not working intermittently

Window Movement

• The window no longer slightly “bumps” when grabbed
• The window no longer jumps to a completely different place when grabbed after a reorientation
• The cursor is hidden while dragging a window in order not to distract
• Restored the movement in Z axis so pulling/pushing the controller is converted into moving the window closer/further away

Accessibility

• Labeled language list icons for screen readers
• Fixed wrong content descriptions in settings dialogs

Security & Privacy

• Removed QUERY_ALL_PACKAGES permission in Meta releases

Downloads & Tabs

• Added a “Close other tabs” button to the tabs panel
• Allowed multiple downloads from the same URL
• Fixed downloads not starting after cancelling a previous download

Cookies

• Added cookie persistence

Telemetry & Instrumentation

• Improved the OpenTelemetry implementation
• Modernized OpenTelemetry usage and telemetry export

Packaging & Distribution

• Modified the Lynx package name to allow sideloading

Bug Fixes & Stability

• Fixed WebXR auto-launch
• Fixed stale EGL surface handles
• Fixed OpenXR hand flags not being honored
• Fixed TrayWidget listener leaks on detach and release
• Fixed a startup crash affecting Meta builds (4.75% of users)
• Fixed a NullPointerException in the web-extension handling that crashed the app (4% of users)
• Fixed memory over-allocations in VR immersive videos
• Fixed memory leak when entering/leaving immersive VR videos
• Fixed a crash when typing in the URL bar
• Fixed a startup crash in Chromium builds when minification is enabled
• Fixed a crash when showing the suggestions widget in Chromium
• Fixed video fullscreen never engaging in Chromium release builds
• Fixed accidentally ignoring user search engine preference

Code Quality

• Replaced string comparisons using == with proper equality checks
• Replaced flavor string comparisons using == with proper equality checks