What's status of Google Chrome support?

What's the status of Google Chrome support? I understand the pain. Google pulled the rug out - giving two middle fingers to Unity's awesome browser plugin. It's an awful thing they did. And it's also their perogative. So now, almost a year later I'm wondering when Unity will provide me a solution so I can stop telling my customers, "Sorry, doesn't work in Chrome".

I know it's hard. And still, I need a solution.

Gigi

 

WebGL works fine in Chrome. Sure there are still some limitations and bugs. But its doable.

 

I have been debating if I should make a web game or a PC game for a while, ultimately it was the idea of having to build the game with an experimental IL2CPP > ICUP > Voodoo > WebGL build that seems to frustrate experienced dev teams that made the decision for me. A couple years from now this will no longer be an issue, but for now it sucks.

It's not UT's fault, but it does blow major chunks.

 

Didnt unitys web gl just come out of beta
http://blogs.unity3d.com/2015/12/07/unity-5-3-webgl-updates/

 

The death of plugins is unfortunate, truly a donk move by chrome. It's fine for them to drop it because chrome has its own set of magic and abilities, but it puts the competitors (and technologies like UT) in a very awkward position.

It's pretty easy to put something together with three.js. Then you can use real javascript with your webgl. If unity can't do it right now, maybe take a look into how it's done without unity, just for fun.

I read about that. But 5.2.x has made people wary of the stability of new updates.

 

Which is a fine idea, one that crossed my mind a few times. But there are those of us that simply want to make games at this point.

 

Then is the platform that important if you're using an engine like unity? Build it once now, export everywhere!... eventually.

 

It looks like 5.3 is even worse. They deprecated the webplayer. I dont know whats going but it seems borderline unusable I was trying to open scenes but unity would lock up, anyway back to unity 5.2.3 seems fine

 

No, the death of plugins is a very good thing. It's just a shame the alternatives were not ready when it occurred. By the way Firefox is planning on finishing up what they've started as well. By the end of next year Flash will be the only one supported.

http://arstechnica.com/information-...i-plugins-by-the-end-of-2016except-for-flash/

 

Yes, that's what I meant by

I am excited for flash and plugins leaving because it's going to be a real huge push on my company to drop a handful of ie browsers that aren't html5 ready.

I personally think the end of plugins is great, because I want the majority of browser development to be done on browsers. But I dislike that browsers are so unequal because I ended up as a web developer...

Haha, great. The 5.2.x stability threads were bad enough, now 5.3 is having issues with the webplayer which is their only alternative for certain sites and browsers? I'm all for dropping support for browsers that can't get it together, but unfortunately certain entire regions of the world can't seem to upgrade. I'm talking about you, china. Find a way to get beyond windows xp, thanks.

 

Isn't firefox a viable alternative?
I actually prefer firefox, but chrome seems to be popular to a lot of people. Why?

 

Chrome is done by google. And as such it integrates with all of the other google stuff nicely. I currently search with google, use google maps for directions, store my calendar data on google, use google email, watch videos with google, write your blog with google, share photos on google. And so it just makes sense to browse with google too.

Its scary when you write it all out in one sentence like that.

 

One thing people that hike or go on vacations will like is that with Bing Maps you can download for offline use an entire state (and other areas). Part of the purchase from Nokia. Much easier than Google's drag & create a small quadrant and download for a set expiration date. Based on that soon as they make a 10" Windows tablet with GPS and HD or higher resolution I'm buying.

 

Google is one of the biggest search engines. Simply visiting it with any browser other than Chrome causes it to advertise their browser somewhere on the screen. By comparison Firefox doesn't really have that much in the way of marketing.

It certainly doesn't hurt any that Chrome is a very good lightweight browser. After a fresh reboot on my system (by the way this is after re-installing Windows 7 SP1 over Windows 10 a few days ago), Chrome takes only a few seconds to start but Firefox will sit there considerably longer before I see the window appear.

If that weren't enough I haven't run into any situation where Chrome's frequent updating has broken anything but Firefox's updates consistently result in it complaining that Flash is outdated and must be updated. Chrome automatically brings the latest releases of Flash, why can't Firefox do it too?

 

Because when you go to caniuse.com chrome tends to have the best support for new things.

Yea, I dislike how they had a hostile takeover of youtube some time back. Couldn't do anything with your channel unless you upgraded to google plus.

I also like how chrome silently keeps up to date. I'm never prompted about new updates. This might concern people if there are potential security flaws, but as a web developer, I like the idea of a browser that keeps my customers up to date. Once they switch off of internet explorer I no longer have to cripple my afternoon coming up with workarounds for their inferior browsing technology

Anyone else celebrating January 12th 2016?

 

What's happening on the 12th?

 

Microsoft IE support I think.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/WindowsForBusiness/End-of-IE-support

 

I feel like if I wanted to make 2D web games at this point, I would have to go with another engine. HaxelFlixel or MonkeyX or even GameMaker. I respect UT, but it seems they don't care about those of us making free webplayer games. I'm not judging that decision, just stating my view on it.

 

That's daft. I was about to switch back to IE from Edge because Edge keeps crashing with starting new Edge processes, and these 'Edge Background Browser Cache Processes' (or whatever that mess is called and the real culprit I think) - seizing 8 GB of RAM and +90% CPU cycles in the meantime. I often have to use the task manager to shut down those Edge processes.

When I visit a web site the won't work in Edge or IE, I find Firefox will render the page correctly more often than Chrome will and Firefox will seem faster - although there are so few pages that won't render in IE or Edge I hardly get to retest my past observations.

 

Interesting phrasing. I feel like technically, IE has always done the best job at rendering pages "correctly", in the sense that if you leave off a closing tag where one is needed, the whole page blows up, while Chrome and FF will assume you meant to close the tag and do it for you.

As a web developer, I very much prefer webkit and lament projects that require previous-version IE support. Despite being a Mac guy, Chrome wins over Safari hands down because of its developer tools.

Back on topic, @Gigiwoo I know it's not a real solution, but you could throw a script on the page that would detect the browser the client is using and display a "Not My Fault" message directing them to FF/IE/Whatnot. Hopefully WebGL will be ready for mainstream use soon enough and this won't remain a problem much longer.

 

Wasn't there a "AAA" WebGL game in development recently where the team decided to pull the HTML5 version in favour of a native application (Windows and Mac?).

They said it was impossible to work with when Chrome and Firefox kept shifting the ground beneath their feet by releasing new versions.

 

Usually in the past when I've had to resort to using Chrome or Firefox it's because IE more stringent security refused to render a page completely.

Lately there have been excruciatingly slow pages created from JS hodgepodge APIs that make me think the pages aren't going to be rendered, regardless of browser...

And as I type this my laptop fans begin loudly whining and I can see in my task manager several Microsoft Edge processes be started although I actually closed a tab (!) and now have only one tab open and a Service Host process alternately with Microsoft Edge processes spike in CPU usage (33%) and all for only having a Unity forum tab open.

 

Any official response? I'm on your side, Unity. I know it's hard. It's not even your fault. I'm just hoping one day you'll hand me a nice, easy (for me) solution, like you do with Mac, Linux, PC, iOS, Android ... well, pretty much every platform except Web. Thanks Google

Gigi

 

Oh wow, thanks for that! I found out from a different link that made it seem like only ie8 was going to the chopping block. Didn't realize they were killing everything below 11. As a web developer (my new catch phrase, perhaps), I could not be more excited! With ie10 and below becoming an insecure platform, I might be able to fully utilize html5 and css3 features!

Internet Explorer goes the way of the dodo, as some articles have put it. I mean sure, you can still use it, but certain groups excited to see its death / bad humans in general will probably step up the malware game since it's no longer going to receive any updates.

Or you could simple go with html5 canvas and maybe a physics library. And then for 3d you have three.js for easy-ified access to webgl 3d. Maybe you could even use it for 2d textures on flat planes to get better performance and better effects for you 2d game.

Safari is catching up. It probably won't overtake chrome at any point, but at least they can use the same css.

My company is on the 'edge' of technology so we use a lot of those js page building technologies like angular and vue. I've even been working on making my own light weight version that just xhrs for pages / templates and stores them, to give you a web-app sort of site. You get served nested templates that make up a page and have individual (but concatenated) chunks of css. Maybe ie doesn't like all of the on the fly simulated xhrs?

 

As example it's both Edge & Chrome and on Amazon's App Developer page for PC/Mac games when you go to configure the app it takes like 2 - 5 minutes to render. I could use wireshark and other debug tools to figure it out but I'll just ignore those since I rarely visit such pages.

 

@goat Got a link for that? I have a feeling there's more at play here than the browser being used. I wouldn't mind taking a look at the network tab of chrome's developer tools. There's probably something interesting going on there.

 

https://www.wireshark.org/

 

It is very good that Microsoft is stopping support of IE versions older than IE11.

Microsoft's IE/Edge blog usually has some interesting things also ...

https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/

 

I've used wireshark before, I meant to ask which amazon page was loading poorly. My bad.

Any competition to chromium v8? If it performs ok and has great feature support it could be the next node-webkit!

 

I generally do not follow browsers that much since I prefer standalone applications.

I think this browser arena is becoming more interesting ...

Microsoft Edge’s JavaScript engine to go open-source

https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2015/12/05/open-source-chakra-core/

 

The only problem here is that open source javascript engines is what causes cross-platform problems. Why do safari and chrome render things differently despite both using webkit? Because webkit is open source and they forked their own. Why will microsoft and whatever other browser run differently? Because the new guy is gonna fork his own.

It's the one scenario where open source backfires.

 

But the goals of the three large companies is not enrich their competitors and go out of business.

Are you active in any of the W3C groups?

 

I wouldn't mind others going out of business if it means css can be more standardized.

No, I just use the existing technologies and new technologies when the project doesn't require ie support

 

Just make sure your code never throws an unhandled exception for any reason, or it will make your app crash and burn.

 

Lots of confusion in this thread.
For starters those of us concerned about this change should have maybe picked up on the fact that this has been coming for well over 2 years: http://blog.chromium.org/2013/09/saying-goodbye-to-our-old-friend-npapi.html
They haven't exactly been quiet about this, with many follow up updates about their plans: http://blog.chromium.org/2014/11/the-final-countdown-for-npapi.html

It's probably worth also pointing out to those that may not know, Firefox is planning the same thing:
https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2015/10/08/npapi-plugins-in-firefox/

The official response is that WebGL is the replacement. 5.3 brings much needed improvements and there are many more on the way.
http://blogs.unity3d.com/2015/10/08/unity-web-player-roadmap/

Here we've developed an internal roadmap for moving our projects away from WebPlayer, which involves both WebGL and a Standalone build with an in-game browser/http comms, along with some more elaborate solutions for our odd use-cases. As we're a fairly busy company, this has been in the works for a long time on our end, but should allow us to completely replace WebPlayer in January 2016. Obviously your individual use-cases may differ in the ability to move away, however I think the alternatives are adequate given the position Unity have been put in, the main issue being that WebGL support is reliant on browsers keeping up.

Shoot me a PM if anyone has any questions about this, since it's been most of my work days figuring out and documenting this development for my company, along with implementing solutions to our problems.

 

Yes, but apparently it's slower than almost every other browser.

http://blogs.unity3d.com/2015/12/15/updated-webgl-benchmark-results/

 

Yes, I do but I'm not giving you my username & password to see that page.

 

Oh. It's for the signed in area. Well, you could always inspect the page, go to the network tab and see if there's a lot of xhr going on.

 

Google still doesn't support Unity. We need to spam Larry until they add support.

 

On 5.3 for the last couple of days. No issues so far aside of having to do (very minor) adjustments to the text UI components, which was easy and those issues rooted from my workaround to best fit bug.

 

Do you mean the player or webgl? If it's the player, that's probably not changing anytime soon. If it's a webgl issue then I'm surprised because chrome is an early adopter for webgl and webkit is open source

I never ran into the issues other people did, but hopefully they come across this post and update.