Tabs and Windows

I am working on support for multiple browser tabs. Good old weblin had only one room per browser window. If you changed the tab, then you changed the room. If you switched between tabs very often, then you switched between rooms all the time.

For the OVW client we will support multiple tabs in the same browser window. Each tab will join a chat room. If you change the tab, then you stay in the room. The client will always show the avatars of the visible tab. If the tab is changed, then the next set of avatars will be shown and avatars of the hidden tab will be made invisible.

With weblin there was only one avatar display for each room. If you opened the same page twice in two different browser windows, then you saw avatars only on one of them. The other browser had no avatars. This was sometimes confusing. Now, there will be avatars on all browser windows, even if they show the same page. You can chat in one browser and see the chat also in the other window. You move your avatar in one browser and it magically also moves in the other browser. This is made possible by a real MVC implementation. The avatars will be duplicated. They are just a view of the scene model.

We currently have a Firefox plugin. But of course, we also need IE and Chrome. These plugins are much more complex, than the simple windows message hook of weblin. In other words: they are more work. But they will provide much richer features in the future and ... tabs.

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