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Hope for SW3D in Safari?

For two years, Director online game developers and their clients have had to live with the way Shockwave 3D content renders incorrectly in Safari and other Cocoa-based browsers like Omniweb and Camino. Macromedia took a fair amount of heat over this from the development community, but long maintained the bug was Apple's to fix.

Last week, Apple posted a patch to the WebKit bugbase that identified the bug and purportedly works around the issue. No clues as to when we might see the fix in a shipping version of Safari, but considering browser releases are usually bundled with OS updates, and OS X.4.2 was released in July, Mac users probably have a few months more of using Firefox, Mozilla, or even >gasp< IE for viewing hardware-accelerated Shockwave 3D content.

As recent versions of Omniweb also use WebKit for page rendering, it's possible that we might see a compatible Omniweb before Apple is able to finish Safari. The Camino development team might also be able to make use of the patch.

In any event, it's great to see some movement in this area.