Unity goes WebGL

http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/14/unity-will-let-you-make-plugin-free-browser-based-games-for-free/

This is indeed very interesting.

yes, it is.

previously they said it will be an add-on you have to pay for. and now even unity free will have it.

i wonder about the future... i know it is a bit slower but theoretically the browser could make all other platforms obsolete.

asm.js + emscripten and boom acknex only needs an webgl/ogl renderer for this to happen

That's pretty cool. Waited for so long for this feature.

Only drawback possibly is the gamepad support..?
I researched a bit how to do this in a browser and it seems to be pretty much in a beta state. Chrome needed an extra config change and Firefox told support is available, but my X360 controller would not work out of the box.

Still I like the fact, I can continue playing around with Unity without having to fear I have to drop any planned WebGL activity due to limited free time.

WebGL has nothing to do with input though, that's a completely different pair of shoes.

True.
In this case I was referring to a game running in browser, displaying via WebGL, playable via Gamepad.

As long as it is slower a lot of the biggest games won't find a place there as they are already really demanding on the hardware. Especially since the most played games right now all have a competitive character (LoL/DotA/CS:GO) and everyone there wants every single fps they can get.

https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/gamepad/raw-file/default/gamepad.html

Fair enough.

I have to admit though that I personally am not very fond of WebGL. Microsofts original stance to it was very good, because quite frankly, allowing any website to run code on the GPU sounds like a perfect way to compromise security.

I know that Chrome's ANGLE tries to mitigate these kinds of issues (among other things), but it just seems like a lot of hassle for not much gain. Alas though, this is really getting far away from the topic.

yes, but support seems still to be lacking.

Despite the fact you're right this is not what I was initially interested in. For me it's just small games or applicatons anyway, and today's systems will be able to handle those good enough.

most current pcs already are faster than the current console generation so it's no big deal if javascript consumes the difference.

but i also see the advantage in smaller games. it's extremely cool that it's not necessary to download or install anything. just visit a webpage. for example i very rarely checked out games by people on this forum because i just found the downloading, unzipping or worse, installing and cleaning up afterwards way too annoying to be worth it. (and by the way every game you downloaded potentially was a much bigger security risk than webgl is. it just could have wiped my harddisk.)