Here is what i thought when I opened this Thread:

As a developer who provides small free games to my customers (Freebies as advertised on my website) it would be nice for my custoemrs to download only ONE exe file, some sort of plugin, that allows them to play the freebies or maybe even demos of my game through the browser. that way they dont have to downloads every single file for any game or demo but can test out the games or play them on their PC without any trouble.

i am not requesting this. i was just asking because it would make playing my games for my clients easier. simple as that. if there is no such thing planned, then not.

it would already help if one could pack ALL files into ONE exe file and just upload that. people could download the exe only and play the game without any need to install. but since sound files, DLLs and whatnot cnt be packed, this is off hand too. too bad...

If encryption is not a requirement, you could also try 3dgsPurePacker (it's free). It packs your whole published game into one exe. Do a search on the forum, there should still be a download link around.

http://www.irrlicht3d.org/pivot/entry.php?id=1236

just look around... everyone is moving to the web... especially for small indie games the web offers a lot of new possibilities.

and there are many ways to do it without doing your own plugin. flash, webgl, native client, tomorrow google will unveil their javascript alternative,...

all the methods require OpenGL ES though.

But still, if I´ve got an engine written in C++, the only ways to make it run in a browser are an own plugin, which would probably need some scripting language for gameplay stuff the, which can be loaded on the fly, something like OSAKit, native client or flash 11, right?
I don´t like OSAKit, as it seems insecure and not many people have the plugin installed, it also doesn´t help with cross platform.
Native client is interesting, but so far it seems to only be supported by chrome and still needs different builds for different architectures, but this at least doesn´t seem to be such a big problem. However, it doesn´t seem as other browsers will adopt it in the near future, does it?
And flash, well... I have no idea what exactly it does with my C++ code and how it then handles different platforms and architectures, but I would actually really like to see flash finally dying -.- The last reason for flash was youtube for me, but they are also finally moving away from it, which hopefully means a much smaller distribution of flash in a not so distant future.
I btw like webgl, but this basicly means that I have to specifically develop for the web, doesn´t it? I also tried some demos a few months ago, which I liked, but they where kinda simple and still much too slow for my taste.
Does this mean that the only solution to do more complex games than angry birds for all different platforms without the user to download more than the game, is to just develop for all those platforms and not using the browser at all?
And if I really want to go through the browser I should probably go the OnLive way?
Or did I miss something and flash is all of a sudden a great way to go for all platforms, being very performant, flexible, comfortable to use, small and so on and also Apple and Microsoft will decide to support flash on their mobile OSs?
I am just trying to figure out, if there is a good way to support the web stuff for my own engine, or if I should just focus on supporting android, osx, windows and linux additional to the already working iOS, where each should just be a matter of a few hours. Happily, OpenGL ES 2.0 is nearly fully compatible to the desktop OpenGL stuff and nearly everything else is also quite platform independant...

I find flash very attractive from a user's perspective: you open up the game website, click "play" or something and then you can play the game - it just works. Flash is installed everywhere, why not trying to use it as a way to bring a game into the browser, like it is done with Adobe Alchemy and that Unreal demo. For instance, I did some research for a potential client and tried a game she pointed out: it was so well done and addictive, I caught myself playing it for 3 hours. One reason was that the gap between finding the game and actually playing it was merely nothing.

What about Silverlight 5? XNA 3D support was now added.