As part of a collaboration between the Mozilla Foundation, the creators' of the Firefox web browser, and Epic Games the latter's Unreal Engine 3 has been successfully used on the web.
On Mozilla's webstie the organisation announced today that "we are excited to unlock this technology for high-performance games, by teaming up with Epic Games. By leveraging this new JavaScript optimization technology, Mozilla has been able to bring Epic's Unreal Engine 3 to the Web. With this port, developers will soon be able to explore limitless possibilities when it comes to porting their popular gaming titles to the Web."
Over a million lines of code are involved in Unreal Engine 3 on the internet and developers will no longer need plug-ins to bring their games to the web.
The Foundation are also "up the path to Web-based games on mobile" and are working EA and Disney as well as other partners to bring "performance optimization to their top-rated titles."
Mozilla says "performance feels like a native application" and invites developers to try out the application. At some point in the future we may see Unreal Engine 4 come to the web but for now this could herald very big things for web-based game development and play.