Web designers wave goodbye to Unity plugin

By Tom May
( netmag )
published

Unity teams up with Mozilla to make games run smoothly in-browser, with no need to download a plugin first.

You soon won't need a plugin to play games like Dead Trigger 2 in the browser

You soon won't need a plugin to play games like Dead Trigger 2 in the browser

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 (opens in new tab) 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 (opens in new tab).

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 (opens in new tab), and see a demo of the new tech in action in this video:

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Tom May
Tom May

Tom May is an award-winning journalist and editor specialising in design, photography and technology. Author of the Amazon #1 bestseller Great TED Talks: Creativity (opens in new tab), published by Pavilion Books, Tom was previously editor of Professional Photography magazine, associate editor at Creative Bloq, and deputy editor at net magazine. Today, he is a regular contributor to Creative Bloq and its sister sites Digital Camera World, T3.com and Tech Radar. He also writes for Creative Boom and works on content marketing projects. 

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