Web Browser Plugin

What is going on with the web browser plugin? Tickets submitted over the years say, "not going to fix ."The color is washed out on Windows and does not work on Android/Quest. Yet this feature does work on Unity. A bunch of people would like this feature for AR and VR. I now have to move my entire project to Unity. People are not just making video games in Unreal anymore but full-blown enterprise apps and streaming content. Epic needs to acknowledge this.

You don’t have to move your game to Unity, you could also just fix whatever the problem is in the plugin. You do get the source! (Which is not the case in Unity, btw.) That seems like less work than moving an entire game over.

Also, embedding web browsers really isn’t a good idea in the long run, because of the frequency by which bugs and holes are found. You’d need to keep updating your game every month with security patches to keep your users safe from potential threats on the greater web. A self-contained game doesn’t have this problem, because it doesn’t access new code that could contain new threats.

And, even if you do keep up with security updates for a while, at some point, you will stop, for whatever reason, and your users will be vulnerable and exposed.

Not everyone create games with Unreal Engine. We create simulation projects and we need it to view some specific files. Problems of a technology shouldn’t be an excuse for half-made plugins.

You have the source code. If the features of the code you’re using aren’t what you need them to be, you can update it yourself.

Note that, no matter how much they work, they can’t have all the features for all the users. Almost any larger project will end up writing its own code for its own features in some area where the engine has base support, but not the additional needs you have. This is the nature of the beast.

Btw, there are two kinds of software development. One plugs together pieces that exist from elsewhere, but doesn’t look inside those pieces, and very seldom builds its own new pieces. The other kind is one that views any external source as a convenience that saves some time, but makes whatever changes to whatever pieces are needed, to achieve the desired outcome. The entire npm ecosystem is mainly developed for the first kind. Unreal Engine has a sweet spot in the second kind. This is not just npm versus Unreal Engine, it’s been with us for a long time – Visual Basic versus MFC; python versus C++, and so on.

This is not a some specific use case.

For example, Unreal’s mqtt only supports localhost. I created a websocket one.
Created an OPC UA client, file drag drop system, pdfium for android and currently working on NDI android. I did all of these because they are “specific”.

But this problem is a general one.
A website with .html extension doesn’t work on Quest devices and it affects lots of developers

So, your do it yourself by then… like attitude doesn’t solve a problem. it just create tension.
and if we can’t say there is a problem in forum, Epic should just close all forum.

I’m just documenting the general approach I’ve found works for Unreal development.
If you’d prefer another approach, there’s Unity, Godot, Lumberyard, and many other engines, as well as the option of rolling your own.
Trying to go into Unreal without understanding what that really means, is a recipe for failure, so if you don’t want to own delivery of features yourself, you owe it to yourself to outsource that somewhere else.