Correction (I’ve been offline for a couple of days, so correction comes in a bit late): As commented below and highlighted in emails from among others Matt Biddulph, I was mistaken to assume that v1.10 includes 3D uBrowser. However, while Matt used Second Life’s “streaming media feature to ‘stream’ a flickr jpeg onto the side of an object”, it seems “[version] 1.10.1 [will bring] an in-client, 2D web browser that floats around the client” according to Andrew Burton (Jarod Godel in SL).
The long awaited embedding of a browser in Second Life is here with the recent release of version 1.10. The renderer, uBrowser a 3D browser built on the Mozilla Gecko engine, is accessible through an LSL (Second Life’s scripting language) call aptly named llHTTPRequest.
As I’ve previously suggested this will bring the interactive richness to Second Life which will push the virtual world into a mashup with the real world weaving data back and forth. Indeed, the first interesting examples of such are already showing up including ex-BBC hacker Matt Biddulph’s notable FlickrScreen.
While Matt’s FlickrScreen will lead the way for the first generation of mashups which add further splendour to Second Life by adding content from the outside, it shouldn’t take long for Second Life data and content to bleed to the outside world. Anything from posting of pictures taken in Second Life to Flickr, to PayPal integration into Second Life (PayPal wallet?) or Amazon’s acceptance of Linden$ as micropayments, is now suddenly possible.
Brave new virtual world.