We don’t hear much about this Second Life™ change. But, Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF) is coming and will affect our use of Second Life in many ways.
The viewer currently uses Webkit, an old unsupported tech, to display a number of viewer panels (like Search). It is also the tech used in Media On A Prim (MOAP). It is a part of SL Televisions.
Word from Oz Linden at the Third Party Developers’ meeting is CEF is coming along. The person working on it is back from vacation. Management got a demo of CEF working in the viewer at the beginning of the month (August I think).
CEF has a gillion little things to do in the viewer. So, while the technical change is not all that difficult, there are many places where things have to change. Finding and making all those changes and then testing for what may have been missed takes time.
Oz thinks we can expect a project viewer about October or November this year. Add all the usual caveats to that educated guess.
Some things seldom used in SL, like Flash and QuickTime, will be dropped from SL. Only things from CEF will be supported. So, change how you are creating media and building for SL.
This is not as drastic a loss as it may sound. For over a year now Flash on Mac has not worked. Nor has it worked on Linux. I suppose we could debate how well it does or doesn’t work on Windows.
Whatever, there are security and reliability issues with Flash and QT. So, they aren’t going to support them. This will be one of the few time the Lab is going to have to break legacy content.
HOWEVER, CEF is a great replacement for what we have… or… don’t have, since much of it is broken now.
I actually uninstalled Flash completely from my system one week ago and haven’t missed it since. I experienced no broken or missing content. All major video sites provide a HTML5 version these days.
‘For over a year now Flash on Mac has not worked. Nor has it worked on Linux.’
Flash does work on Linux…
CEF3 support in the viewer is still very much incomplete and buggy. You can test it already, with the Cool VL Viewer v1.26.15 branch (just set the UseCEF debug setting to TRUE).
A list of the current, known bugs and shortcomings can be seen on my forum:
http://sldev.free.fr/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=1543
Thank you 🙂
\we can expect a project viewer about October or November this year\
sheesh, a year after it was promised. All i can do is wait, i suppose, meanwhile i’ll play with the CoolVL CEF viewer.