Frequently asked questions
This is all a bit pointless isn't it? No one wants to browse in 3D...
Well, yeah but, no but, yeah but... :) It's really just an illustration of how to embed the Mozilla® Gecko rendering engine. It will be extraordinarily useful once it's fully integrated into the Second Life client. Being able to visit Web sites displayed on a prim in our world may be of questionable value. Being able to use it on prims for UI, mixing Web content with our own UI, creating XUL/SVG (eventually Flash/Java) applications will open up all sorts of great content possibilities.
What is this code licensed under? Can I use it in my own code
This code is now licensed under the Mozilla Tri-License.
When will this make it into Second Life so I can use "Web On A Prim"
Two questions there really. This code will be rolled into the Second Life codebase once the small Win32 dependency in llembeddedbrowserwindow.cpp is removed. As far as Web On A Prim goes, there is still a lot of work and design to be done before that can happen. My work on other parts of the code such as bugfixing and scaling has a (much) higher priority so it's going to be a while. I do continue to work on it in the evenings so progress is being made - albeit slowly
I don't use Windows - is there a version for Mac OS X or Linux?
Not currently. LMozLib needs a little work - there is a small piece of the code that has some Windows specific calls in it. One of the major things on the list of outstanding issues is to move this into platform independent Mozilla code. Once that's done, I'm hoping someone who knows Mac OS X or Linux will help porting uBrowser and the other test apps to it.
Flash no longer works in uBrowser - it did before didn't it?
Yes and no. The new mechanism that triggers a page update isn't fired by an update in the plugin window. I expect this can be made to work but Flash support was always pretty marginal anyway. In the short term, you can force an update of the page frequently yourself and Flash will work as before. In the long term, support for plugins is on the list of issues to resolve.
Will uBrowser work in 16bit desktop depth?
No, I'm afraid it won't work quite right. In order to get picking to work properly, I render the same scene 3 times. The first time I use a calculated red/blue texture to figure out a rough coordinate. Then I draw the scene again using a calculated green texture and get a fine grained coordinate that ranges from 0 to 4095 along with face information. Finally, I draw the scene using the browser texture. I need at least 24 bits of color to do this. It could be made to work with less color depth using more iterations but I didn't have time to investigate. Something for later perhaps.
Do you support the <canvas> tag?
Yes, the latest version does - there is a screenshot here.