Can someone please point out the advantages and disadvantages of having the unity webplayer load as a part of the website (like Flash banner) vs having it open as a separate Pop-up or a new Window.
Though it is a bad design, what are the demerits of having a website with Flash and Unity content on the same page?
If someone can explain this with respect to performance, memory handling, plugin related downtime that would be very helpful.
I have seen many websites which run Unity as a part of their website and few websites which run them as pop-ups. Just wanted to know about the best practices when it comes to having a website based solely on Unity.
Thanks.
The disadvantage is that the webplayer isn’t light in any form, so having it in a website can considerably impact the performance, even more than flash.
I would definitely not use it for ad banners and alike.
I haven’t had issues running silverlight/flash/unity side by side, but that was for a specific business application. However, I have noticed that running more than one instance of the Unity Web Player greatly impacts performance. So as dreamora suggested, it’s probably best you don’t use it as a common element (banners, navigation, etc.) if you expect users to have more than one page of your site open at once.
Let me rephrase my first point, if my website were to depend entirely on Unity for its content delivery, then should I just have a page with Unity occupying 800 x 630 or should I load it as a pop-up as how some of the major MMO gaming companies do.
Is there a memory allocation by browser for each tab/window or anything I don’t know off?
The only issue you should be concerned about is having multiple instances of Unity running. If you feel that your site design would have the users only have the one window open with Unity embedded in it, then you can do it that way. If you feel that uses will have multiple windows open, then you may want to manage it with a popup instead?
Beyond that, it’s purely up to your own design.
I would have said the only problem with having the player embedded would be that when the user doesn’t have the web player the space is replaced by a different sized picture and could damage the layout of you page. But it is easily changed anyway.
There should not be any performance difference between running the unity web player in a full window vs running it embedded between other html elements (other then any performance hit caused by those other html elements itself, like, when you have some very expensive flash animation running besides the web player or something). So, it’s purely a design decision.
Though, depending on the browser and OS, there may very well be a difference between running in a browser window and in fullscreen mode, because then, we don’t depend on the browser for rendering. But, that is a separate issue.
the main diff is that the browser is locked to 50FPS normally, while fullscreen isn’t capped and vsync enforced. that can help especially on lower end ones.
and you don’t have the problem that 800x600 on my 1920x1200 look like a gameboy screen 
but other than that its up to you.
just keep in mind that using non fullscreen for the sake of overlays won’t get you anywhere as divs / flash can’t overlay the unity webplayer for example
Like most of you have pointed out , having Unity pop-out as a separate window is mainly a design thing where Unity plugin does not have to interact with other plugins / html content.
What happens when it comes down to browsers? Is there a specific difference in performance between Firefox / Chrome / Safari. Some of the big titles have a separate version of Unity player when it comes down to FF or Chrome/Safari. So is that again a design issue or is it something the Unity devs can’t tell us about (NDA maybe) ?
Thanks again for the help. I am sure this discussion may help someone in the future.
People can lose popups, where if it’s embedded people can’t accidentially click it behind. I would personally go with embedded just so people can’t randomly click to lose it.