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They didn't ban Unity. The legacy NPAPI extension format (which the Unity web player plugin was built on) was deprecated in favour of PPAPI. NPAPI was outdated

They didn't ban Unity. The legacy NPAPI extension format (which the Unity web player plugin was built on) was deprecated in favour of PPAPI. NPAPI was outdated, unperformant and insecure, the goal of PPAPI was to address those issues. All that would be needed for Unity web player to work out-of-the-box in Chrome again is for it to be ported to PPAPI

Klathmon 10y ago
And they were given a 4 year heads up that chrome was going to remove it. Instead Java used that time to build several help pages that showed you how to install other browsers then made a shitty anti-chrome campaign when it was finally removed, and unity just sat there and did nothing the whole time.
- Dylan16807 10y ago
  Here's what a Unity dev said: "I don't expect Chrome to keep supporting PPAPI native plugins for any longer then they have to (in order to support Flash), because it has the same security issues as NPAPI. And, porting the plugin to PPAPI would be far from trivial, and not be compatible with existing content anyways" Is any of that fundamentally wrong? They decided it was a better use of their time to go right to WebGL.
  - Klathmon 10y ago
    Honestly I'm not that sure, and that was a shitty way for me to word it about Unity. The big thing with PPAPI is that it can be much more sandboxed than NPAPI ever could, which means it already has a big step up in security, but obviously anything whose purpose is to circumvent the restrictions put in place for the browser is going to be inherently less secure than just running a website. In the end PPAPI could let you run code from a webpage as "root" on your computer, and there is nothing Chrome or anyone else can do to stop that. That being said, I think Unity is going in the right direction trying to get away from plugins altogether. They are trying (successfully IMO) to compile to "true" web technologies and let the game be exported as HTML5 and javascript which is the right choice.
PhasmaFelis 10y ago
> They didn't ban Unity. The legacy NPAPI extension format (which the Unity web player plugin was built on) was deprecated in favour of PPAPI. Which had the effect of banning Unity. I understand that this was a good move from a general security standpoint. I'm annoyed that Google has done their best to make it impossible for a power user to override it, just as they made it unreasonably complicated to install non-Google-approved plugins. By all means, set your softwares' defaults for general security. Don't tell me what I'm not allowed to do with my own computer "for my own good." We don't accept that when Microsoft or Apple does it. > All that would be needed for Unity web player to work out-of-the-box in Chrome again is for it to be ported to PPAPI No. All existing Unity apps would have to be recompiled. Making legacy games harder to run leaves a bad taste in my mouth, even if it's for good reasons.
- wyqydsyq 10y ago
  They wouldn't have to be recompiled. Unity apps running via UWP don't execute directly in the browser document context, UWP is it's own stand-alone plugin which is then embedded where needed in the page (similar to Flash and Java), this is why you have to download the UWP executable in addition to the browser plugin. The browser plugin is merely a wrapper for the UWP binary. Unity apps compiled against the UWP runtime should run all the same regardless of whether UWP is wrapped in an NPAPI or PPAPI plugin, unless the wrapper plugins themselves and/or how they call the UWP runtime are implemented differently.

Klathmon 10y ago

And they were given a 4 year heads up that chrome was going to remove it. Instead Java used that time to build several help pages that showed you how to install other browsers then made a shitty anti-chrome campaign when it was finally removed, and unity just sat there and did nothing the whole time.

Dylan16807 10y ago
Here's what a Unity dev said: "I don't expect Chrome to keep supporting PPAPI native plugins for any longer then they have to (in order to support Flash), because it has the same security issues as NPAPI. And, porting the plugin to PPAPI would be far from trivial, and not be compatible with existing content anyways" Is any of that fundamentally wrong? They decided it was a better use of their time to go right to WebGL.
- Klathmon 10y ago
  Honestly I'm not that sure, and that was a shitty way for me to word it about Unity. The big thing with PPAPI is that it can be much more sandboxed than NPAPI ever could, which means it already has a big step up in security, but obviously anything whose purpose is to circumvent the restrictions put in place for the browser is going to be inherently less secure than just running a website. In the end PPAPI could let you run code from a webpage as "root" on your computer, and there is nothing Chrome or anyone else can do to stop that. That being said, I think Unity is going in the right direction trying to get away from plugins altogether. They are trying (successfully IMO) to compile to "true" web technologies and let the game be exported as HTML5 and javascript which is the right choice.

PhasmaFelis 10y ago

> They didn't ban Unity. The legacy NPAPI extension format (which the Unity web player plugin was built on) was deprecated in favour of PPAPI. Which had the effect of banning Unity. I understand that this was a good move from a general security standpoint. I'm annoyed that Google has done their best to make it impossible for a power user to override it, just as they made it unreasonably complicated to install non-Google-approved plugins. By all means, set your softwares' defaults for general security. Don't tell me what I'm not allowed to do with my own computer "for my own good." We don't accept that when Microsoft or Apple does it. > All that would be needed for Unity web player to work out-of-the-box in Chrome again is for it to be ported to PPAPI No. All existing Unity apps would have to be recompiled. Making legacy games harder to run leaves a bad taste in my mouth, even if it's for good reasons.

wyqydsyq 10y ago
They wouldn't have to be recompiled. Unity apps running via UWP don't execute directly in the browser document context, UWP is it's own stand-alone plugin which is then embedded where needed in the page (similar to Flash and Java), this is why you have to download the UWP executable in addition to the browser plugin. The browser plugin is merely a wrapper for the UWP binary. Unity apps compiled against the UWP runtime should run all the same regardless of whether UWP is wrapped in an NPAPI or PPAPI plugin, unless the wrapper plugins themselves and/or how they call the UWP runtime are implemented differently.