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Chrome dropping NPAPI support
I know this has been on the horizon, but they have just recently disabled NPAPI support by default forcing users to re-enable it if they want to use plugins that need it. This of course is means that ding commercial builds for the Unity web player is a questionable practice at this point considering how widely used chrome is these days. I haven't seen much from Unity about this so I was wondering how Unity is tackling this one. Are you guys going whole hog on html5 builds or is there a new web player in the works. I haven't been having a lot of success with the html5 builds and the web player worked so well. Just curious where you guys are going to be investing your energy. I am very excited about html5 builds however and am really looking forward to getting those working well.
Cheers!
This has been the most official comment I have seen :
Unity is hard at work on a WebGL solution to allow developers to make games that run in browsers. : http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/953356/chrome-blocking-unity.html
The problem is, Unity's WebGL support is pretty gross... Builds take forever, big projects won't work due to memory constraints, and it may end up basically requiring 64-bit browsers... Should work fine for small stuff though.
UNITY 5.0.2 Release Notes:
WebPlayer: Workarounds for new Chrome, where NPAPI is disabled by default.
Huh, I wonder what this means exactly. "Workarounds" seems a vague word to use. I guess I'll have to update to 5.0.2 now. Have you tried it?
EDIT: According to this Twitter conversation, it's just the toggling of the Chrome flag. $$anonymous$$aybe it self-toggles now, or maybe they needed to do something on their end. Regardless, this is temporary.
Didn't tried yet, sorry. Just thought this could be helpfull, since nobody noticed this change ;)
Chrome support for NPAPI is toggled off as of Build 42 but can be re-enabled by following these directions https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/6213033?hl=en
Which is nice but to build a commercial product and expect people on one of the most widely used browesers to go through the hassle of re-enabling it, isn't really feasible. Not to mention that there probably won't be too many more chrome releases before they disable support completely.
Yeah I've pretty much seen all of that. I was looking for something a bit more in depth describing what direction they might be going due to declining support for NPAPI. I am really excited about WebGL builds, but it's still very much beta, and I haven't had much lock getting it to work. Just curious if this means they are going to phase out the web player and put all their money on html5 or if they have an alternative to NPAPI for the web player.