WebKit

Second Life and the Mac WebKit Problem

by
Me... a Protester?
Me… a Protester?

 My readers will know Mac users have a problem. There is no near term solution to the problem for several reasons. Even more confusing is there are multiple problems. And today a group approached me hoping to put together a movement to show Linden Lab the extent of the problem and the interest in getting it fixed.

So, I’m scratching my head wondering if the Lab is in a position to fix the problem… and which problem are we talking about? Since I’m not a Mac user, I’m probably not the best one to write this, but no one else seems to be covering it.

I’ve touched on Mac issues in the past; Second Life News 2013-11, Firestorm Viewer News 2014-7, Viewer Release Pipeline Update, and others. The SL Viewer and Third Party Viewers are moving to support Apple’s Cocoa frame work or may be I should say did so move in 2013. But, that has left Apple users on older operating systems behind. SL apparently has problems running in the older Apple OS’s. This has resulted in Apple users staying with older viewer versions.

As we near another release of the Firestorm Viewer those issues are coming to a crisis point for some users. The recent blocking of Firestorm 4.4.0 is bringing home the point of the team only allowing 3 versions to run on the SL grid and blocking older versions. People are getting the idea the team is actually blocking older viewers. 

Read more

Second Life and WebKit

by

Webkit™ is a core Internet Browser, sort of. More precisely it is the render engine for the Safari web browser. Until mid 2013 it was the render engine for Google’s Chrome browser on Mac. The Internet Explorer browser that Microsoft uses is powered y the Trident engine. Firefox uses the Gecko engine. A number of mobile devices use Webkit.

In 2005 it was announced by Apple’s Senior Vice President of Software Engineering Bertrand Serlet that WebKit would be open source. In 2010 a WebKit 2.0 project was announced.

All this is of interest to us because the Second Life™ viewer uses Webkit to power its internal web browser and Media On A Prim (MOAP). You see it used most by in-world TV’s. I suspect panels like User Profile are also displayed using WebKit.

Read more

Second Life WebKit Fail / Error – Problem Again

by

Update 2010-09-15: From one of the Snowstorm office hours meetings comes word that some releases of the viewers are not registering the Webkit, Quicktime, Flash, and other DLL’s correctly.I don’t have a fix.

This problem is popping up again. My previous post is here: Second Life Media Plugin Webkit Fail – The comments there have more suggestions and fixes.

Jesica Brown found a new solution I had not heard. Find the slplugin in the SL Viewer folder and right-click it, then set it to Win95 compatibility mode. Thanks.

Threads on the SL Forum are:

Media_plugin_webkit failure – Error with media_plugin_webkit – TV’S PLUGIN

Update 2010-07-29 – There is a JIRA: http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-17087

Windows 7 – 64 bit seems to be having additional problems with this issue. Currently there seems to be no fix. Vote at the JIRA.

Please leave comments in the original post.

Media Plugin Webkit Fail

by

Update: 2014-06 – WebKit remains a problem. For the latest information scroll to the bottom of a WebKit article and look for the tag WebKit (or click this link). Click it to f ind the latest articles. You may need to use your browsers ‘Find-in-Page’ search (usually Ctrl-F) to find the pertinent part of the article. – Apple seems to have abandoned QTWebKit. In general the world is moving to Chrome Embedded Framework (CEF) as a better HTML5 type replacement.

Update: 2011-08-25 – Be sure you read the comments. Additional recent fixes have been added by others.

Update: 2010-07-23 – The new SL 2.1 viewer is causing people problems. It is an old error coming up again. There are several threads popping up on the SL forums. See: (Second Life WebKit Fail / Error – Problem Again) – One new solution is from Jesica (see comments), which is to find slplugin in the SL install folder, right-click for properties, and set it to Win95 compatibility mode.

Update: 2010-06-17 – With the release of Emerald Viewer version 2165 several people are running into this or a similar issue again. Those not having a problem installed to a new directory/folder rather installing over the top of the previous install. Others have copied the WebKit files from Snowglobe to fix the problem. Others just added slplugin to there anti-virus/firewall white list. In my version 2100 MOAP (Media On A Prim) isn’t working otherwise the viewer is fine. More to follow once I upgrade my viewer, watch for a 2165 review update.

Original Post

A new problem with the Second Life 2.0 Beta Viewer and viewers based on the new viewer software. People are getting a popup error when starting the viewers. Some think it is the firewall, doesn’t seem to be. Somethink it is the anti-virus software, doesn’t seem to be. But, I have yet to find a solution.

Second Life Viewer 2.0 Beta
Plugin “media_plugin_webkit” has failed

JIRA VWR-17087 – Plugin “media_plugin_webkit” has failed

JIRA VWR-17139 – Windows 7 With flash installed via mozilla auto discovery plugin fails to register in SL’s llMediaPlugin – Possible Solution for Windows 7 – The install of Adobe’s Flash 10 did not resolve the error for me.

Snowglobe users ran into this problem in October 2009… Its back…

The recent viewer update did not resolve the problem…

Solution

I added slplugin.exe to my Windows Firewall and told my anti-virus it is an exception. I checked my computer for older versions of slplugin.exe and replaced all the older versions with a copy of the latest. I rebooted the computer after the changes. After the restart the SL2.0 Beta viewer started without the error.

For now that appears to be the solution.