Support Casting

[brochard]

Add official support to casting to an Android or Apple TV, right now you have to use sketchy extension, it's not a good user experience.

[jilvin]

I end up having to use Chrome just to cast to my TV. Is casting dependent on anything proprietary?

[Marr]

its insane how this is still not a thing.

[truthful_lie]

This is the feature I miss Chrome for.

[mrcn]

Please do this!

[NiceSk1ll3r]

Lets hope Firefox teams cooks something up, would really love this feature.

[argold]

I support this. I really enjoy casting and need to have chromium to cast my screen, if Firefox had this feature that'd be great

[ng3gja]

Please add this casting feature

[LROD55]

Over 600 votes, almost 100 comments, and over 3 years later. It has also been consistently featured in the "Mozilla Connect Weekly Recap: Top-Voted Ideas" for months. Still, nothing. @Jon and @itskaren , can we have someone look into this, or at least give an update? I think we'd all benefit from knowing the progress made so far and how we as users can better advocate for this feature to make its way into development.

[itskaren]

Hi everyone,

Hope you're all well. @LROD55 , you're right - especially for an idea with high hopes and engagement, you all deserve to be updated on where we are with casting. Thank you so much for your patience, and I'm very sorry for the delay.

We ran an investigation into the technical requirements for basic casting on desktop, specifically with Chromecast support as a starting point. I wish I could give better news, but here's what we learned:

• Technical Complexities: Chromecast requires a networking layer--since we don't have Google's proprietary networking technology, we'd have to build our own networking interface, which would take over a year's worth of engineering work from a different team. Due to the large scale of this work and cross-team dependencies, we couldn't prioritize it at the time since we already had our hands full with critical, also large-scale media pipeline improvements. So far, the work has been paused so our teams can figure out how to best work out this technical issue.
  
  
• Partner Dependencies: While we'd love to see how we could drive casting support with AirPlay and other casting services, a successful casting experience via a non-native browser hinges on partners who are willing to work with us and have resourcing for cross-company support to make the experience usable for the people we'd serve. Among the prospective partners we'd reached out to, the Chromecast team met with us several times to map out potential ways we could tackle the problem--once the team underwent an organizational change, we lost the dedicated support line that would've helped us build a good user experience. 

Please note that I've moved to a different team on desktop, but I will monitor our media roadmap for any developments towards this idea. Today, I'm reaching out to our mobile Firefox product team to evaluate opportunities with other services (casting to Android or AppleTV, as OP mentioned), as the technical pathways will likely be different from desktop. If there are any leads, I'll drop updates here.

Thank you, and have a good weekend.

[Pera]

yes please! i hate chrome, i dont want to keep it around just for chromecast anymore

[LROD55]

Wow, @itskaren sorry to ping you again but just wanted to say thank you for taking the time out of your day to respond and give us such a detailed update. I am grateful and hope that we can learn more in the near future.

As a side note, I am sure you guys have looked into it already but maybe Miracast or Matter Casting could be an easier challenge to tackle rather that proprietary protocols like Chromecast or AirPlay? Just a thought.

[CleoDeNile]

I've recently made the switch to Firefox and the only thing I regularly find myself missing is the ability to cast media to other devices. It would be great to have a stable, official way to do so.

[Stars]

I could have sworn that I used casting on a way older ver, possibility before it was renamed to FireFox. Anyone as old as I am that may remember something like that?

[pugboy1321]

@Stars Your memory is off I think. 

It's been Firefox since 2003 and "casting" as a concept in this context debuted in 2013, and Firefox has never natively supported it without third party extensions. 

[ronxronquillo]

Now that Facebook had already removed casting option from FB live/videos, it makes more sense to have this so that there will still be a way to watch FB videos on a TV via Firefox. Please make this a reality!! 🔥