I have one project starting with a team, the game needs to be on browser.
What is the state of Unity WEBGL ? what works great and what doesn’t work so great if someone has some experience and have made some game with WEBGL ?
What is the recommended browser to use ?
Unity’s blog has an entry where they discussed performance of WebGL. It’s almost a year old now though.
https://blogs.unity3d.com/2015/12/15/updated-webgl-benchmark-results/
Depends on your target market as far as which web browsers are mainly used.
WebGL is supported and works (correctly) only in a very tiny number of web browsers.
You may want to consider releasing a Webplayer build as well.
Firefox works very well… maybe the best… for WebGL not sure. I think Firefox and Edge are the only real options. Never used Edge myself but someone on these forums mentioned WebGL works fine for them in Edge a couple months or so ago.
Here is a very recent blog-post that goes over some more technical memory consumption information in regards to targeting WebGL with Unity: https://blogs.unity3d.com/2016/09/20/understanding-memory-in-unity-webgl/
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How is webassembly progressing?
I’m looking forward to the web game library that comes after WebGL. I think WebGL is kind of the first step toward something truly better and different than the plugins and as such it is not the real answer. More like an experiment to test out ideas. Basically the common practice in all things.
Whatever comes next whether that is WebGL2 or something entirely different built on the lessons learned from WebGL… that will be a thing of beauty.
This is too restrictive, the webplayer would be a better option, but i am not sure this is a good and secure way to sell web games ?
Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Edge. That may be a “tiny number”, but it’s virtually all of the market aside from IE holdouts (which seems to be down to 25% and continuing to drop). Most browsers no longer support plugins such as Unity, making the webplayer a non-starter these days, never mind the fact that it’s completely impossible if you’re using Unity 5.4 or later anyway. Also WebGL works at least to some extent on mobile, which the webplayer could never do.
–Eric
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WebGL might work reliably with these other browsers. I only know that when I made my Atlantic Crisis game and released on GameJolt a couple of months ago I was told that many people could not play it because it was WebGL and did not work with their browsers. And one of the mods in the forums over there told me that only the latest version of Firefox runs WebGL games reliably. Then a person here said that Edge works well too.
So I am just going by what the players themselves are saying mainly. Making Webplayer version is a way for more people to play the game. Same for the desktop download. It could be something to do with the browsers web game players use the most. Maybe they are not the typical browser usage and skewed toward the non-WebGL browsers.
You’ve been misinformed 
Chrome runs WebGL just fine as well and it is the dominant browser on the internet and it is evergreen, ie. it updates on every restart to the latest.
Could be but I’ve had people I know even tell me the game popped up a box. I also checked that myself and got the same thing. The box literally said try a browser that supports WebGL such as Firefox. Of course, that was IE something or other. I’m guessing there must be a lot of these gamers using IE.
IE is definitely the worst, FF/Chrome/Edge should all be fine if on a somewhat non-ancient version.
@GarBenjamin : You might also be running into players who are purposefully keeping their browser outdated to let them run the Web Player for older games.
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Yeah I think that is very possible. I have a feeling that many of these web gamers are doing exactly this.
I just did a quick check with IE and Opera on this new laptop and this is what I get:
The top message is what IE shows when trying to play my WebGL game and the bottom message is what Opera shows when trying to play my WebGL game.
The bottom line to me is if I see this then it is not working. Kind of like when websites started using some of the fancier stuff that didn’t work in older browsers. A lot of people including me didn’t rush out to update our browsers. We just stopped visiting the websites.
Maybe GameJolt’s view is they just don’t want WebGL there. lol
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Since 5.4 I’ve found it to be working pretty well.
I test in Chrome and Firefox, and both run well. Make sure your quality settings are lower, otherwise you can cap out at 15-20FPS, even if you have a monster of a graphics card.
I turned off Anisotropic filtering and AA and framerates went up dramatically. Also using the Override for WebGL → Crunched option on assets works well in reducing build size.
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The issue isn’t that those browsers don’t support WebGL, it’s that Unity only officially supports Firefox with it’s WebGL builds. I know that doesn’t change much for those of us making WebGL content in Unity now because either way our users get messages like the above, but WebGL itself is supported by most (all?) common browsers now as has been said.
The fundamental support is there. For now the issue is more on the Unity end. And I’m not knocking them for that - last time I played with it WebGL in Unity had improved drastically from the previous time, so it’s definitely moving in the right direction.
That’s not true though. https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/webgl-browsercompatibility.html The “not supported” is for mobile devices. (It does actually work on my iPad, just not…very well.)
–Eric
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Fair enough. Are the messages in @GarBenjamin 's screenshots from builds made in older versions, then?
He doesn’t have any screenshots from supported browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Edge). As the note on that page says, IE11 is only in the table for completeness.
–Eric
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It’s more their specific mention of Firefox that I was referring to. Edit: Only in that second post, so fair point in any case.