Second Life Virtual World to Get Firefox 207
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.'"
What will it be used for though? (Score:5, Insightful)
Popups (Score:3, Insightful)
Still arround? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Still arround? (Score:3, Insightful)
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)
Re:Popups (Score:3, Insightful)
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:Nice concept, bad implementation (Score:3, Insightful)
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:Popups (Score:3, Insightful)
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 [everythingisnt.com] 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!
Re:What if (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Second Life rocks (Score:3, Insightful)
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.