Chrome doing away with plugins

[Julien Lynge]

Just FYI for this group:

Chrome has decided that they're moving away from the traditional plugin model in a big way, and there are changes coming to Mozilla as well.

As a bit of background: the Unity webplayer uses the NPAPI as the glue between Unity and the browser.  This is the way plugins have traditionally been done, and it's used for things like Silverlight and Java too.

Chrome has decided that they're going to entirely abandon NPAPI, starting at the end of this year and phasing out over the following year.  Luckily, they recognize that 10% of Chrome users use Unity, so they'll be phasing support for it out later rather than earlier.  It's not entirely clear what technology is going to replace NPAPI - perhaps NaCl (though that's not cross-browser), HTML5 apps, or some other technology.  You can read more here:

http://blog.chromium.org/2013/09/saying-goodbye-to-our-old-friend-npapi.html

Mozilla is moving to an opt-in mode for plugins: plugins will not play by default on a page, rather the user will have to enable them on a per-site basis.  This will definitely make it harder / less elegant for embedded plugins like the Unity web player.

So between these two, we have a fairly major shift in the plugin landscape.  Unity is definitely aware of these changes, and while I have no doubt they're already looking at alternatives, they're being very tight lipped about it at the moment.

This is definitely something to be aware of as you design multi-user browser games, sims, and VWs.  Hopefully this will be a good thing - the old sandboxed way of doing plugins was hard on everybody, and it's possible that the new technologies will allow a lot more power for plugins and allow them to behave more like applications.  Regardless, it may be disruptive and the shift may be bumpy, so plan for it in your current and future projects.

-Julien

[Rick Anderson]

Vivox as well, would be the same. 

I've been working on using OpenTok to replace Vivox. Which may be affected in a similar way. However, OpenTok is also switching to WebRTC which may be a viable alternative by the new year. The plan is to make this an open source implementation.

--Rick

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Rick Anderson
Director of Virtual Worlds
Division of Continuing Studies (DoCS)
Rutgers University
(732) 586-3265