No more web player support in chrome and firefox

Unity 5 has WebGL publishing available now. It's currently a preview, but works pretty well for the most part.

--Eric

 

Yeah from what I'm reading HTML5 has near native speed and is pretty robust considering where the tech was only a few years ago. Guess WebGL will be replacing Webplayer?

 

Like Eric mentioned Unity 5 has WebGL preview. I have yet to build for it as I'm waiting for Multiplayer Photon Cloud Support. I think you can still publish your game via Unity Webplayer but you will need to inform your users to use Firefox possibly to Load the Webplayer until Unity's WebGL is 100% Ready. If you don't need Multiplayer Support like I do, and your just building a Single Player game you might be OK to Build with WebGL now... give it try.

 

Indeed it is official now, Chrome will not be pushing back: http://blog.chromium.org/2014/11/the-final-countdown-for-npapi.html dun dun, plugin-pacalypse is on.

End of year all disabled by default (whitelist removed), then April 15th no more plugins at all. A config switch can enable it for devs but end of year is essentially the end for consumers.

Unity 5 final and WebGL solid is all I want for Christmas.

 

Wow! Unity decline in Chrome from 9% to 1% really? I'm curious about the usage of Flash since it's built in now.

Anyhow I find it interesting that they say some few popular Plugins are Whitelisted (allowed by default), but this is not true at all... Unity is being Blocked by Default right now but I thought it was suppose to be on the Whitelist?

Atleast we have until April 2015 before they pull the plug, disabling all NPAPI by default, but allow override with chrome://flags/#enable-npapi until September 2015.

April 2015 gives Unity some time to prep WebGL further... so I'm happy about that atleast. Thanks for sharing the link @drawcode

 

Well there you have it, Web Player is officially dead on OSX in Chrome.

Is there ANY ETA on when 4.6.1 will be out so we can make these 64 bit builds?

Not to be one who gripes, but I have stuff out there that has stopped working for my users, because I can't build a proper version, because the compiler I need has not been released yet. But the world has known about this for over a year.
Why was this a back burner issue for Unity, why was this not in 4.5? For a cutting edge cross platform compiler, this is kind of bush league stuff.

 

Agreed - a lot of things will break for users here which really shouldn't be acceptable. How about letting everybody try the Unity 5 beta early so at least we can try to compile for html5 and see if that works?

 

Damn. Just before Ludum Dare, too. That's rough. Guess I'll be making an html5 game for it this time, if anything.

 

Chrome has officially dropped support for NPAPI. So I guess it's time to start deploying in WebGL - even though it's still in the preview stage. So far I have found it to work well. Unfortunately this means that any games hosted on Wooglie and Kongregate will not run in Chrome at all. The Wooglie site has been automated and has not received updates in a long time, but perhaps they or Kongregate will add support for web-based Unity games in some way soon.

 

Technically they only disabled it by default (chrome://flags/#enable-npapi), but I doubt many people will be willing to re-enable it on their end.

 

True, and True.... lol lots Unity Browser Gamers will be lost unless they actually decide to download and use firefox to play a Unity Game. How inconvenient! I wish Unity Webplayer was integrated into Chrome and Firefox the way Adobe Flash is in Chrome! Ah well... bring on WebGL!

 

I strongly suspect Flash's days are numbered and that Chrome will eventually removed that as well. We know WebGL is going to be around for a considerable length of time and supported eventually by everyone, but PPAPI could be shut down whenever Google feels like it has served its purpose. Most likely that is to simply hold things together until migration is done.

 

At least for my webplayer games, the beta state of Unity WebGL export generates loads of errors when I try to port them :/ Hope it will improve quickly, even if I understand how complicated that is.

 

It hasn't. This isn't some small change they can just hack together. "Over a year" isn't actually very long for something like this.

 

You know we worked with Mozilla and had some demos over 12 months ago?

http://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/03/18/unity-5/

Just because we can show something working in Firefox doesn't mean it magically works out of the box across all browsers. And just because we can get some existing games working in WebGL 12 months ago doesn't mean every single Unity customer's game can be converted into WebGL. These things take a lot of engineering effort and energy.

 

In my point of view, Unity is doing an amazing job (webgl magic) over a situation that is totally out of their control (chrome plugin blockage).

Sadly, however, we are now in a gap. Webgl still does not deliver what webplayer does... And I don't know for sure even if a road map is possible for some current limitations are tied to webgl standards (for example, afaik shadow quality is bad because it's not possible to get precise 3d hardware capabilities).

 

Currently I plan to disable Shadows for an upcoming WebGL project. Shadows consume a lot of resources anyway, so if you're building for Browser Platform I think trying to use alternative shadow solutions is best for optimal performance. For example Blob Shadow vs Real-time Shadow on Animated Characters, or Dynamic Objects.

 

There are other limitations... For example is impossible to loop sounds without gap... fonts in UI does not work as expected... there are also random artifacts in shaders.

But I guess that these issues are just a matter of time.

 

Word on the street is that Firefox is also dropping support now. I honestly can't believe that Unity knew about this since 2013 and here we are going into May and there is A.) No working WebGL player and B.) Soon to be no working web in Chrome or Firefox.

We are pulling out our hair over here as we now have 5 web based projects that are dead in the water until we have some sort of working WebGL build..

 

So what's wrong with your WebGL Builds? Yes, Currently WebGL is Buggy I won't deny that, but I've Managed to Build at least 2 prototype projects successfully. I had to disable shadows for now, but beyond that everything seemed pretty good to me. Performance and Compression of Builds still sucks compared to Web Player I know, but you just have to spend extra time optimizing your projects. Unless it's more than just optimization you need on your end, maybe some particular scripting or critical features you need for you project won't work in WebGL yet? Curious...

 

Shared a project earlier this week, only to learn that it won't run in Chrome. And, if rumors are true, it won't be long before it fails in Firefox too. This is crippling news!

Gigi

 

So... did half of kongregate just implode?

 

Yup. Kongregate, Game Jolt, etc contacted all Unity developers to ask them to convert their games to WebGL.

 

Oh. And the replies were all along the lines of "we can't" and or "it's not ready"?

Looks like now's the time for me to put my text based rpg that is pure jquery up on kongregate because it'll work.

 

Rumors? It's not "rumors". Mozilla has said it

Stop stealing my ideas!

No, seriously... I was going to do that. lol Not Kongregate, necessarily, but I'm convinced I could make it work.

 

If you're talking about the WebGL bug, it's fixed in the latest stable Chrome release, which came out a few days ago. Someone had accidentally reverted the fix in the previous release. If you're talking about browsers dropping support for the Unity webplayer plugin, well, I guess it's time for us all to switch to WebGL.

Or beat others to the punch and get your game working with WebGL. Alex Ocias's article, How to Upload Unity WebGL Content, is pure gold. As long as you're not using the unsupported features listed here, you generally shouldn't have any problems other than hand cramps from sitting there twiddling your thumbs during the excessively long build times.

 

@wccrawford no worries, I don't think a gaming portal is the best way to distribute my game since I want players to be able to edit the json files to add their own content to the game.

I see how that could be useful for unity projects, but I mean I used a plain old text editor and made a game in jquery & html5. Not even using the html5 canvas... just jqueryui things like buttons and... actually, it's mostly buttons.

 

If there was anyone on this forum that was more pissed about Webplayer not being supported in Chrome anymore it was me lol! I've long took a breather, and said WebGL is the future! Actually knew this for sometime now... Now is the time! We have some migration pains to deal with yes, but the future of Gaming in the Browser with WebGL (no plugin dependencies) is bright. Just a matter of time... I'm looking forward to showcasing my WebGL project soon!

 

I think they should wait until WebGL can do what Flash or webplayer does before retiring plugins. You know, to make it more seamless for the devs.

 

I guess when you say they you mean Google? Google doesn't care about us game developers lol. If they did they would have long reached out to do a survey or something to get our feedback on the matter. Plugins are a security issue, and also increases support cost I think on their end helping people resolve the many problems Plugins can cause. So for them it's a huge relief to get rid of Plugins, and i'm sure Mozilla is right behind them too.

I too wish we had more time with Plugins in Chrome, but not much we can do... just move foward! WebGL / HTML5 is the future of Web Browser Development from Websites, Web Apps, to Web Games.

 

Funny thing about everyone trying to abandon flash. When it came down to attrition (continually adding content to the screen waiting for fps to tank), flash lasted longer... yet they still said html5 was better in every way. It is the only thing flash could do better, but that's a pretty significant factor for RTS games.

It might not deserve to be, but it's certainly got the backing it needs to at least shut down the competition.

 

How many years has Flash had to improve their underlying system? HTML5 is still relatively young.

 

A lot It was pretty much an adobe monopoly for interactive web content.

Doesn't excuse the lies. Even if it's no longer the case, it was wrong at the time to say flash had no use cases. Although now that plug ins are dying, I guess flash won't be around much longer unless AIR has an explosion of users soon.

Phonegap vs AIR. Both adobe, so at least adobe is fine lol

 

Adobe will be fine as long as people will buy Photoshop and Illustrator, lol.

 

That too. I think even my family has purchased those 2 or 3 times. I use gimp now for my more advanced image editing needs.

 

Yeah, gimp is really underappreciated. I've been successfully able to erase persons or whole buildings from photos with just clone tool, not to mention more advanced features, like Resynthesize.

 

Well for prototype tools I agree but for products that we are taking to market on behalf of clients we can't have the reputation of their IP or company resting solely on a partially working, partially optimized, partially finished WebGL player This is why we begrudgingly have been relying on the web player and not that's essentially been killed. Again it boggles my mind that this wasn't a looonngggg ongoing priority over the past year given the length of warning that everyone, including Unity had. You better believe people are going to be looking very hard at Unreal or Cocos right now and seeing what can be done with the source code of those engines to ensure that the rug isn't pulled out from under us like this. S***, there are million dollar web IP's that stand to loose hundreds of thousands of dollars right now as 25% of their userbase just evaporated into thin air.

 

The WebGL stuff works - its just buggy, slow and unpredictable. I suppose over time it will become more stable but for the time being there is significantly more work that needs to be done to drop a decent WebGL build than there was required for throwing down a Web Player build which was basically just fire and forget.

Honestly its probably much easier to make WebGL work than it is to switch engines mid development so I doubt there is any serious hazard of existing IP's shifting engines over this but it could definitely be a consideration with new IP's looking at Unity's WebGL and wondering if they can expect it to be stable for their release.

I dunno if any WebGL is stable though, seems like browsers are just like "Ok plugins are going away, hope you have WebGL stuff ready!" and everybody else is like "Hey wait! wtf! slow down!"... Comparatively, I haven't heard of anyone having really vast "oh its easy just click here for webgl" type of success anywhere, it seems like its still in the state we see now with Unity's inplementation, everywhere. Heck, look at the Dead Trigger demo they did ages ago, that looked all kinds of fancy and stable, right? Whats the reality? Not easy to do, so I don't trust anyone that says their webgl is bulletproof and ready to go because they have a working demo.

 

Do you have a source?
I can't find anything more than rumour on this subject.

I kind of need to keep ahead of this issue, we have 50+ programs we need to support that run in WebPlayer.
Clients are unhappy enough about Chrome not working, Firefox would be a nightmare.

Also it seems the Windows 10 browser, Spartan, will not have ActiveX support, so Web Player will not work there. I can't test to confirm this, but it seems like it is the case.

 

Quite a number of news sites and Microsoft's own blogs are confirming that Microsoft Edge won't support ActiveX. If you still need it though Internet Explorer is going to be included alongside Edge in Windows 10.

 

That's good news, at least. I would assume Spartan is taking over as the default browser though?

 

Yes.

 

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/30.0/releasenotes/

https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2014/02/28/update-on-plugin-activation/

https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2013/09/24/plugin-activation-in-firefox/

It appears Firefox is still just disabling them, and hasn't given a timeline for their complete removal, but you can se that they're saying that's the eventual goal. They're already making it harder on vendors by making them re-apply for the whitelist every few releases and making users click to use any that aren't in the whitelist.

 

yes, that's all I've seen so far, though that second link does certainly suggest that a disable is coming at some point in the future.

I'd hope that prior to disabling npapi they give a timeline as Google did, or we'll have no time to brace for the impending S***-storm from our clients...

 

Yea, well said Mr. Fox

 

It seems FF support was ended a bit before 2018

Web plugin does not work in

Firefox v55 x32
Firefox ESR v55.0.3 x32 (yes, even it)
Firefox Developer Edition v56 x32,x64

Unity plugin even not listed among the plugins so, obviously, trick with { plugin.load_flash_only : false } in about:config does not work more as well.

It is strange that ESR version does not work too.

 

It's not strange in the slightest. Firefox 52 ESR is the version where support for most plug-ins was removed. Firefox 55 ESR is three major releases after that point. Why would you expect it to work?

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/52.0/releasenotes/

Since Firefox 52, released in March 2017, was an ESR release you will need to go back as far as Firefox 45 in order to have an ESR release that supports the Web Player. Good luck getting anyone to downgrade that far though.

 

@Ryiah

>Firefox 52 ESR is the version where support for most plug-ins was removed

As said on Roadmap page :

and I was under impression that any ESR version will support Unity at least until early 2018
Other-vice it is not clear what they did mean, probably ESR 52 has some type of timer which will break support at the 1th of January - happy new year every one!!!

 

Web player is gone. Don't cling to it.