Second Life Virtual World to Get Firefox

lecreuset writes "Clickable Culture has an article discussing the imminent wedding of Firefox and Second Life. From the article: 'The virtual world of Second Life will leverage an embedded version of Mozilla Firefox in a future release, supporting in-world web browsing and the display of web pages on the surfaces of 3D objects, according to developers at Linden Lab.'"

Comments

What will it be used for though?

[ZephyrXero]

That's great unless they start sticking advertisements all over the place with it...

Re:What will it be used for though?

[wralias]

That's great unless they start sticking advertisements all over the place with it...

Hah! Anyone who knows Second Life will know that it is already saturated with advertising. The problem is not advertising from the "first life" economy, but advertising from "companies" in the Second Life economy. Tringo, anyone?

More likely, I see people linking to their real-life websites from their virtual homes or stores. There are already some pretty cool web / Second Life integrations, such as the ability to purchase and deposit virtual money into your Second Life account from the web, or to buy virtual goods in real time on the web.

Also, this integration may allow people experienced with javascript and web application development to do some interesting things in SL (even though SL has its own scripting language already).

Re:What will it be used for though?

[Gwala]

It already happens.

Difference is, it's advertising for inworld products and services. The 'Second Life' economy, is a fairly large one, there are people generating over $50K/year through inworld products and services (one such person reports they will be doing over 100K this year.)

But, one of the big problems is letting people know about your products and services. A person inworld setup MetaAdverse as a way of advertising your inworld products via inworld billboards - these billboards usually act as sponsorship for various events and locations which would be too expensive to maintain otherwise. Likewise, it provides a valuable method of advertising your products.

The other big method of listing items is to put them up at a site like SecondServer.net or SLBoutique, and let people browse them online. It's these sites which are going to benefit most from HTML-on-3D, since it will allow rapid browsing from a purely inworld enviroment.

(I've also done a really quick guide on getting SL under Linux running, which is accessible here)

-Adam

Second Life

[sound vision]

I read this and I was like "Second life? What?" To save you lazy suckers Googling: http://www.secondlife.com/

Re:Second Life

[Solder Fumes]

If you've read Snow Crash, Second Life is currently the closest thing we have to Snow Crash's cyberspace. As time goes on, I only see it getting closer to that concept.

For Those Who Don't Know What Second Life Is:

[tquinlan]

http://secondlife.com/whatis/

"Second Life is a virtual world - a 3D online persistent space totally created and evolved by its users. Within this vast and rapidly expanding place, you can do, create or become just about anything you can imagine. Built-in content creation tools let you make almost anything you can imagine, in real time and in collaboration with others. An incredibly detailed digital body ('Avatar') allows a rich and customizable identity. A powerful physics simulation running on a backbone of hundreds of connected computers and growing with the population allows you to be immersed in a visceral, interactive world that as of April 2005 covers more than 12,000 acres and 20,000 owned plots of land. The ability to design and resell 3D content, combined with the ability to own and develop land and a microcurrency, which can be exchanged to real money means that you can build a real business entirely within Second Life."

Popups

[maelstrom]

Wow can't wait to have 3-D popups hording my screen. I love the fact that unscrupulous advertisers have figured out how to game Firefox, I'm starting to see more and more popups again. I guess its time to turn off Flash.

Re:Popups

[WhiskerTheMad]

This is the answer to your flash problems. Blocks *all* flash, if you want to see it, just click on it. Works great for sites that have a lot of annoying flash advertising, and simple to use :)

Re:Popups

[Enrico Pulatzo]

Unscrupulous? And you think actively blocking the content that pays the bills of the people whose websites you frequent isn't?

Popups may be annoying, but they're hardly dishonest. Just because something opens a new window doesn't make it malicious. Unscrupulous would be more along the lines of the Gator people managing to get changes approved to Firefox to make their popups work.

Re:Popups

[Heisenbug]

Here's my "moral" stance: when I load a url, I'm giving the site permission to do whatever they want -- within the bounds of the window. That means annoying overlapping divs are fine, but opening new windows, resizing the current window, playing sound, etc, are all out. If you want to do anything that doesn't fall within the confines of the window I opened the url in, you ask permission. As a simple rule of thumb, anything that doesn't revert simply by clicking the back button definitely crosses the line.

Is breaking that rule malicious, unscrupulous or dishonest? I don't know. I do know that I sure won't feel unscrupulous for enforcing it.

Re:Popups

[gad_zuki!]

>Popups may be annoying, but they're hardly dishonest.

Actually, they are incredibly dishonest to the point that they would be illegal if similiar tactics would be used in a more mature industry, like in print ads or television.

Take a look at your typical pop-up. I collect ad servers for my ad blocking hosts file so I'm kinda a connoisseur of this crap. First and foremost, the current trend is to make the ads look like a windows system message. Not just any message, but mimicking the style of the security center and warning of 'unsafe computing.' There are many variations on this theme like, "you have new email," "your computer is unprotected," "click here for updates," etc.

We are way beyond the point of dishonesty, we are in the terrain of fraduelence.

As far as the 'people should learn to deal with the ads' argument goes, I'm all for it, but the first site that gives a 403 to people with adblockers will be replaced with another site that doesnt care. Welcome to the web, you have no contract with the webmasters the same way you dont have to sit down and watch TV commercials. Life is funny that way sometimes, but somehow we manage.

Take the moralist position all you like, but as long as you know the other side laughs at your "everyone place nice" attitude. Pardon me, but I got a pop-up telling me my IP address is exposed and I should buy SupersecurityMonkey 2.0 to fix this for only 39.99!

already done for quake

[heatdeath]

iirc, there's a quake mod that renders html as textures, although it's not browsable. I couldn't access the site, though. It got slashdotted already. Does it just display the html as a texture, or is it browsable?

Okay...

[fizban]

Wait a dog garn minute, let me get this straight...

I'm going to be able to slack off from my virtual life (and say, read slashdot) while I'm slacking off from my real life playing Second Life?

Okay, and meanwhile, in Darfur...

Re:Okay...

[GrubInCan]

Or even better, a real life client application that runs inside the embedded Firefox browser. Then you could escape your humdrun SecondLife by escaping into a new (and possibly different) real life.

Re:Okay...

[samoverton]

What would be better is if they create a client for Second Life that runs in a web browser. I think you can see where I'm going with this...

Re:Still arround?

[ShawnDoc]

After all if I am going to pay a monthly subscription I would much rather have something that gives me content (W.O.W.) than something that asks the community to produce its own.

Um, Second Life doesn't require a monthly fee. There's a one time fee of $10 and after that you are free to play as much as you like. Now you do have to pay to buy properties and some other in-game items, however there are plenty of free "sandboxes" for you to use to practice creating things and show off your wares.

Second Life rocks

[John Zero]

I've seen Second Life mentioned on Slashdot around last summer, and I'm still in game :-)

It might not appeal to all -- it's not exactly a game, more of a virtual place, where you can live your imagination, build, socialize. Don't expect WoW-like quality and content, but you can get and do much more, many things you can imagine, can be scripted to an extent. Or you can make clothes, build houses, cars, etc.

It's a virtual world, and it's getting somewhat similar to the Metaverse (like in Neil Stephenson's Snowcrash novel), though it's way way far yet.

You can try it out free, and stay if you like it, nothing to buy, and also you can live with a one-time payment, if you don't want to spend monthly on it.

Yes... I AM an SL addict :-)

Re:Second Life rocks

[jafuser]

I think one thing that doesn't get mentioned about SL very often is that it isn't run by the company's sales & marketing department, like most games are.

The people at Linden Lab (the place responsible for developing SL) are geeks. They like Linux, they share opinions about languages, database, file formats, and protocols, they play the same games we play. They laugh at obscure geek jokes that we do.

And unlike any other MMOG, you *can* catch the designers, developers, administrators, and occasionally even the CEO in-world and have a reasonable conversation with them.

That's what impressed me the most about SL on my first day. In the "Welcome Area", I spent a few minutes talking to one of the lead developers, and I got reasonably technical answers to my inquiries, and was not treated like one unit of a herd of cattle like most game companies do.

Yes, SL doesn't have all the fancy flashy new graphics features you see in the latest games, but it's still a technically fascinating concept as it stands -- a completely dynamic, 3D, multiuser world that streams all updates (caused by users, their scripts, or the environment) in real time.

You can have MORE!

[hey!]

Please can I have a simple web browser which blocks pop ups, ads and doesn't allow in spyware and other junk.

Why the lack of ambition?

Your virtual character can have a web browser that attaches not to a virtual server, but an actual one. The Second Life server.

If you have sufficient karma, you will be able to use your web browser to find out what virtual person sent you the spam/created the pop-up/whatever, and obliterate their existence. It'd be like have root access to God's server.

Re:What if

[0racle]

Or like a web browser thats integrated into the underlying OS that also acts as a help file renderer and file manager. I can't believe that no one has ever thought of this before! You know what would be totally cool? Having a bar along the side of your web browser that could go out and get headlines from your favorite news sources. Damn I'm brilliant, I'm going to be rich.

Re:Still arround?

[cmacb]

Second Life sounds like something that should have been an open souce / free / funded by donations project.

There probably WILL be an open source system such as Second Life at some point. But that point might be ten years in the future for all we know. While there are a few Open Source projects that come up with something totally new, for the most part Open Source is a lot like Microsoft, wait for an innovation and then copy it. My feeling is that Open Source eventually does it better, but it rarely does it first. I'll settle for that.

The other good thing about that is that SL is supported on Apple computers and people are running it on Linux (though that isn't fully supported YET), so it's the only fully collaborative environment that I know of that is not OS specific. When Open Source gets around to doing this, the results will look a lot like Second Life. (And the price is right, as mentioned elsewhere)

Linux version?

[MarcOiL]

What about the Linux client they promised at start? If it's good enough to run their servers, it's good enough to have a client. Specially as they use OpenGL for graphics and already have a MacOSX client.

Re:Nice concept, bad implementation

[cowscows]

Second life is all about allowing providing a world in which people can easily create things. More specifically, three-dimensional things that can be experienced in a way somewhat similar to how we see the real world.

I'm guessing you haven't actually played it, because it's not moving around in a pre-determined environment, it's moving around in a pretty random environment, one shaped and changed by a whole bunch of different and uncoordinated people.

Games are like books/written words. There are people who are skilled and talented at making good stuff, and then the rest of the population who mostly makes crap. There are people in second life making incredible things with the tools that the game could provide. And I'll bet the majority of those people aren't partiularly talented writers, just because most people aren't. What's wrong with them having fun creating in a format that works for them?

Re:What if

[Derleth]

For one thing, it's difficult to design a program that does everything. This is because the complexity in software mainly comes from the interfaces between components, and the more your program does the more interfaces it has to have.

(Interfaces aren't always explicit, but the best ones are. Bad software is mainly characterized by fuzzy boundaries between functional units and promiscuous sharing of data between blocks of code that don't need to know it.)

The easiest program to design does one thing and hooks up to a simple API for its communication with the outside world. Unix command-line programs are built this way, and it has resulted in a lot of stable programs. Trying to expand a program is usually best done by splitting it and giving each part an easy way to talk with the other parts. This can be as easy as a bunch of subroutines that call each other or as complex as a client/server pair that send data to each other over the Internet. That way, each part can be reasoned about in isolation and ignored when you need to think about other parts, or the connections between all of the parts.

For another thing, it's difficult to change one part of a program. Making the boundaries between parts clear and strong helps, but it's never quite as easy as you first imagine. If you want to change the web browser component, do you really want to rebuild the entire project and try to integrate another browser into your framework? (If you don't have a framework of some kind, it would be easier to scrap the project and start again. An ad hoc communication system between components is usually impossible to change cleanly.)

It could be done. But I don't think it could be done well.

Update from the Second Life dev team

[jncook]

Callum Linden and I are the two developers at Linden Lab working on Mozilla embedding. Some details:

Why bother? We want to allow people running Second Life full-screen to access our web site. Right now, if you want to bid on a piece of virtual land, or read the scripting language wiki, you have to either run in a window or switch out to your browser. That sucks, so we're fixing it.

The second goal is to get to third-party web sites. I want to trade SL currency on Gaming Open Market while staying in-world. Our internal scripting language supports e-mail into and out of the world, as well as XML-RPC. Lots of people have used this to build cool web sites that tie into the virtual world. See the postcards on Snapzilla postcards and the Second Life del.icio.us tag for examples. Getting these connected into the world would be a big win.

Why Mozilla? Could there be any other choice? :-) Our competitor There.com uses Internet Explorer to do their internal web browsing, but they only support PCs. We love open source tools and use LGPL stuff extensively in both server and client. Plus, we need support for Win32, Mac and Linux.

Working with the Mozilla codebase has been interesting. It's huge, and very complex. But I'm proud to say we've found and fixed a couple bugs in Mozilla, and contributed the changes back to the Mozilla folks. I'm looking forward to Firefox 1.1 and the potential for the new Cairo/OpenGL rendering subsystem -- that may really help with embedding for 3D worlds.

So despite the linked description, Callum and I are working on getting an interactive 2D browser working first. Web pages on the surfaces of 3D objects may not ship in the next version (1.7). It'll ship as soon as it's done.

As an aside, if any of the Mozilla developers are reading this, we could use some help with embedding, specifically how to post mouse-click events into an embedded instance, please send me mail.

Cheers,

James