Experimental Firefox support

Edit: as of r55, Firefox support is enabled by default. You no longer need the special URL!

Hi all,

We've been working on cross-browser compatibility for C3 behind the scenes for a while now, and we're ready to start testing Firefox support. This support is experimental! Please do not do serious work in it at this time, or if you do, back up regularly! The aim of this is solely to start finding Firefox-specific bugs, and help establish how well Firefox works for Construct 3 at the moment.

Currently if you visit Construct 3 in Firefox you will still see a "not supported" message. There is a special URL to test in Firefox at the end of this post. We don't think we'll have official Firefox support for a while yet, due to some Firefox bugs (see below). However you can still help us test Firefox support which in the long term will help stop us being limited to Chrome.

Known issues

There are a few known issues that affect C3 in Firefox:

• The Layout View can be slow to render and scroll due to bug 1163426
• UI animations are currently disabled due to bug 1354501
• Firefox does not support CSS containment, which helps make sure CSS layout is fast, so the editor may perform poorly compared to Chrome in some cases
• Firefox does not support <dialog> elements, so we are using a polyfill, but this may cause some dialogs to behave slightly differently
• There are various other minor issues noted in the 'Platform information' dialog (Menu -> About -> Platform information)

Try Construct 3 in Firefox

To help test Construct 3 in Firefox:

1. Download Firefox if you don't have it already. Choose the 64-bit version if you can. You may also want to test with Firefox Nightly which is experimental but two versions ahead, so may work better with C3.

2. Make sure you're using the latest version by selecting Menu -> Help -> About. The current stable version of Firefox is 55, make sure you're on at least that version or newer.

3. In Firefox 55+, visit this URL: editor.construct.net/?firefox-alpha-for-testing-only

4. Construct 3 should start! You'll see an extra warning - please take care since Firefox support is experimental and we can't guarantee the stability of it at this time. There may well be issues like silently corrupting project files that we're not yet aware of. If you want to do real work, stick to Chrome for now.

If you find bugs, please post them on the Construct 3 issue tracker on GitHub. Please note at this time we are prioritising Chrome support so Firefox bugs have a lower priority and may take longer to be investigated/fixed. If you have general feedback, please post a reply here! We're keen to hear how it works for you.

Happy testing!

That's nice! It's the only browser that handles touch/pen input except from edge pretty well or at all.

I'm mostly using a tablet (Surface Pro 4) for development so this is very welcome.

Is there any plans on Edge version as well?

We hope to support both Edge and Safari later down the line, but the stable versions can't run C3 at the moment. We'll add experimental support for those as well when we can, hopefully later this year.

This is really great. Firefox is still very popular with many people, so hurrah!

I'm a browser freak and I'm finding that Construct 3 runs just fine in Chrome, Opera, Vivaldi, and Brave. Of course, all of those use Chrome underneath, so no surprise there. In case anyone is curious, Vivaldi and Brave are newer browsers that seem to work pretty well.

Vivaldi focuses on multimedia and was founded by the people who fled Opera.

Brave focuses on safe browsing and was founded by people who fled Firefox.

FirefoxOS is dead and most of the people who worked on it mysteriously moved to China.

Ashley, I'm amazed to see that you are going to try to put Construct 3 on Edge and Safari. That would really be great!!!

Edge is getting pretty good and may be supporting the things you need for Construct 3.

Safari, on the other hand, doesn't seem to want to improve or allow any other browsers to use their own engines. Boo! Am I missing something? Can Construct 3 run on any browsers on Mac? Or am I confusing Safari with WebKit? I'm woefully ignorant of Macs!

Can Construct 3 run on any browsers on Mac?

Yes, Chrome of course. It's only iOS where Apple have banned other browser engines.

I'd be interested on any feedback if you've tried C3 in Firefox!

Wow, didn't expect the Firefox alpha to be released this quick. I've tested it out for a while and it seems to work.

I have posted all of my mostly minor bugs over at Github.

If there is anything specific we should focus on in the future, an update here or in C3's changelog would be appreciated.

Firefox support is now enabled by default in r55. Thanks for your help testing!