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.'"

Second Life

[sound+vision]

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

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

[tquinlan]

http://secondlife.com/whatis/ [secondlife.com]

"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."

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?

Re:Popups

[WhiskerTheMad]

This [mozdev.org] 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: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.

Re:What will it be used for though?

[CatherineOmega]

According to the Linden Lab statement [secondlife.com], it will be used primarily for integrating content into the environment. So yeah, it could be used for annoying "banner" ads, but the most useful applications would be for commerce or communications, or gaming. With the ability to generate HTML from a script running within SL comes all sorts of potential uses, everything from a complex web app to a quick and low-bandwidth way to render text on a sign, rather than forcing the client to download and decompress a texture.

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: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 [anshechung.com] 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 [metaadverse.com] 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 [secondserver.net] or SLBoutique [slboutique.com], 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 [adamzaius.net])

-Adam

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 [secondlife.com] 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 [gamingopenmarket.com] 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 [sluniverse.com] postcards and the Second Life del.icio.us tag [del.icio.us] 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 [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