Web designers wave goodbye to Unity plugin

In recent years the Unity game engine has emerged as one of the most popular ways for web developers to create games that run smoothly in the browser. But there's been one tiny niggle. Like Flash before it, Unity games require players to download a plugin. But now that's all changing.

Unity has teamed up with Mozilla - the organisation behind popular web browser Firefox - to bring Unity-authored games to the web without the need for a plugin. This will be achieved using a combination of the web graphics library WebGL and asm.js, a supercharged subset of JavaScript.

The changeover will take place with the release of Unity 5.0 later this year - after which, Mozilla says, Unity games will run smoothly, without plugins, in all modern desktop browsers that fully support WebGL. You can read the full announcement on Mozilla's blog, and see a demo of the new tech in action in this video: