Section 02
Runtimes
A browser cannot play anything on its own. For twenty years the way to make it play was to hand the page to somebody else’s software — owned, versioned, installed by the visitor and eventually withdrawn. Six entries, five of them switched off.
What the machine could play was decided by the cards inside it, and none of that was the browser’s business.
oujouer.com collection
6 entries
The layer between the game and the browser.
- 02.01Java applets
Code that ran inside the page in its own sandbox, with a security model that outlived its usefulness.
- 02.02Shockwave
The heavier sibling that arrived first and handled the work the lighter runtime could not.
- 02.03Flash
For roughly fifteen years the browser was the largest games platform in the world: no install, no store, no gatekeeper, and one company's runtime underneath all of it.
- 02.04Silverlight
A competing runtime that arrived late, shipped, and was withdrawn without ever becoming the default.
- 02.05Unity Web Player
A plugin that brought a full 3D engine into the page, and was deprecated once the browsers closed the plugin interface.
- 02.06WebAssembly
The runtime that replaced the plugins is part of the browser itself, which is the whole point of it.