Friday, 26 February 2010

Two new browser plugins, partying like it's 1999

In a world that is slowly and surely moving away from depending on plugins to provide advanced features, the decision to release new browser plugins for Internet Explorer is surely a little surprising. Even the popular, widely used Flash is coming under fire, with many advocating a switch to native HTML 5 capabilities in favor of using the proprietary plugin.

Two new plugins are looking to turn the tide. First up we have Vision Engine 8 from 3D game engine developer Trinigy. The company's engine runs on a variety of platforms, and with the new plugin, the Web browser does too. The engine boasts Direct3D 11 support, Havok physics, and sophisticated multithreading support. This plugin allows complex 3D games to be played in the browser.

Browser-based games are big business, especially Flash-based games. The hugely popular FarmVille and Farm Town games on Facebook use Flash and have between them many tens of millions of users; and there are many more like them. The graphics of these games are limited in their complexity, and slowdowns when scenes get complex are commonplace. Many of the tower defense-style games, for example, can get extremely sluggish when there are lots of bullets flying around the screen. Proper 3D gaming engines should allow more flexible in-browser gaming without the same performance issues.

The thing is, it's not clear who would install a special plugin just to play 3D games in their Web browser. Quake Live provides Quake III through a browser plugin (albeit a single-purpose plugin that can only play Quake Live) and has failed to gain any significant traction. Existing browser games are successful because they fit into social networking and other sites that people already use, and because they stick with Flash—a plugin that virtually everyone has already, even on corporate desktops and other restricted environments. As such, the plugin seems to be a solution in desperate search for a problem. Sure, it means that you can play 3D games in your browser, but do you really want to?

Xiph.org's plugin
The next plugin at least has a clearly-defined purpose. The latest version of the Xiph.org codec pack for Windows includes an experimental IE plugin that brings limited support for the HTML 5 <> tag to Internet Explorer. The video tag is one of the more keenly anticipated parts of the HTML 5 specification, as it will enable sites such as YouTube to deliver videos using pure HTML, instead of having to depend on the Flash plugin, and a beta version of YouTube that uses the tag is already available.

One of the sticking points for adoption of the video tag is that Internet Explorer does not presently support it. The Xiph.org plugin strives to change that.

Presently, the plugin is only a Technology Preview, and its support is very limited indeed. The biggest long-term hurdle is that the plugin supports Theora video, not H.264. Although Theora is the format chosen by Firefox for its video tags, H.264 is the format being used by YouTube and similar sites that are trialling HTML 5. As Xiph.org only produces codecs for patent-free open source formats (Vorbis, Speex, and FLAC audio compression, Theora video compression), this limitation is not surprising, but it does mean that the plugin is unlikely to ever be particularly useful.

The plugin is currently only branded a "Technology Preview," too; it presently lacks virtually any features above and beyond playing video, including basics like offering playback controls. It also requires pages using video tags to be written in a specific way to ensure that IE even tries to load the plugin.

If the plugin ever reached a stage where it was stable and fully featured, it might yet achieve some significance. A long-standing issue with the HTML 5 video tag is that the HTML 5 specification itself does not specify which codecs should be supported. The result has been two camps (well, three if one includes Internet Explorer, which supports nothing at all); WebKit-based browsers (most significantly Safari and Chrome) support H.264. Mozilla-based browsers (most importantly Firefox) support Theora. Firefox leads WebKit in market share, so Theora should become more widely supported more quickly, but H.264 has more corporate backing (notably from Google and Apple).

A complete version of this plugin could swing things substantially in Theora's favor; as well as the 24 percent of web users using Firefox, the 60 percent using Internet Explorer would also be able to use Theora videos. Such a large target would make Theora support much harder for H.264's corporate backers to ignore.

That said, the days of the browser plugin are surely behind us. Flash gets a pass due to legacy and being the only widely deployed solution that can do the kind of thing it does (supporting rich interactivity, animation, audio and video, webcams and microphones), with Silverlight and perhaps Java the nearest also-rans, but anything else demanding a browser plugin? Fugeddaboutit. The trend is clearly towards extending HTML to provide these capabilities, not proprietary browser extension mechanisms, which makes producing a new plugin today quite an extraordinary thing to do.