Unity 5.3 makes WebGL support official

Unity’s latest update drops the ‘preview’ label for WebGL and makes the technology an officially-supported build target.

Since Unity 5.0, WebGL has been an unsupported preview technology. As of 5.3, it will be selectable as a platform un Unity Cloud Build, allowing developers to test their game in-browser and create apps for Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome, among others.

As well as official support, Unity 5.3 will also add support tickets for the platform for Premium and Enterprise plans.

A number of other improvements will also take hold, including the enablement of desktop-quality reflections in Unity’s Standard Shader. Previously, WebGL would utilise a simplified version of the engine’s mobile shader using the OpenGL ES 2.0 library.

Unity WebGL will also feature automatic compression for servers not configured to download gzip-compressed files. The runtime will decompress the gzip in JavaScript on the client side, introducing a slight delay but avoiding large downloads.

Additionally, asset data will now be LZ4-compressed in memory, only being decompressed when loaded. This should help free up extra memory for developers.

Other additions to the update include webcam support for any browser that supports the getUserMedia API, as well as better documentation and a number of bug fixes.

See the full list of changes here.