On Friday, the Google O3D announced that they O3D has changed from a browser plug-in to an extension of WebGL.

In some ways, this is quite a good move, I think, but there is another side to the coin too.

The issue now, is that the O3D plug-in was able to run in just about any of the current crop of web browsers, now it will be a lot more restricted in available platform. WebGL itself is a work-in-progress, and is generally only available in the nightly builds of Firefox, Chrome and a few of the other major browsers, but I have yet to find an officially released version of a browser that supports WebGL.

What this means of course, is that it makes O3D less useful for writing web applications until these browsers get released with WebGL.

The other thing is that I am going to have to rewrite some of the O3D tutorials on this blog to take the WebGL change into account, so watch this space for updated tutorials coming soon…

Share