Teaming up with Lucasfilm to release the trailer for Star Wars: Episode I, Apple has managed to create a large audience of web surfers who will all hear MIDI music the same way. While providing benefits to web authors who wish to include background music for their web sites, the methods used to create this audience raise questions for the future of browser plug-ins.

As many of you may know, the creative geniuses at Lucasfilm have released the second Star Wars Episode I trailer onto the Internet. Because of the selection of Apple’s QuickTime 3.0 as the exclusive medium for the Internet release, over three million web users have already downloaded Apple’s QuickTime plug-in. Those of you familiar with past incarnations of the QuickTime plug-in may remember it as rather innocuous, designed only to playback QuickTime .mov files. Aside from .mov and other QuickTime formats, this new plug-in supports, most notably, Photoshop, Windows bitmap, TIFF, PNG, WAV, and MacPaint files, as well as MIDI.

A new hope for consistent MIDI-file playback on the Web.

Websites started using MIDI because the web seemed a bit dull without background music. Websites stopped using MIDI because what sounded good on one computer sounded terrible with another. More than a year ago, Headspace developed a plug-in called Beatnik, which they hoped would make MIDI files sound uniform across computers with different sound hardware and operating systems. Beatnik has yet to succeed because it has not compelled a majority of web surfers to download the plug-in, and forces those who do to download updated versions of the plug-in.

QuickTime accomplishes the goal of making MIDI playback sound consistent across different computers without even having that express intent. On Windows alone, different sound cards come with different instrument sets for MIDI, and some of them sound utterly horrid. Using an instrument sound set licensed from Roland, MIDI over the Web sounds great through Apple’s plug-in.

The future of plug-ins may become more menacing.

“‘General purpose’ plug-ins don’t allow a user to deactivate one type of file without giving up the use of others.“

Because Netscape’s browser resolves conflicts between plug-ins that handle the same file extensions by allowing the most recently installed plug-in to process those files, QuickTime by default now handles MIDI for millions of Netscape users who have installed the plug-in. With millions of Star-Wars-driven downloads of the QuickTime plug-in, website developers can now use MIDI files with confidence to provide background music for their sites without having to worry too much about how they’ll sound.

However, any other company could release a plug-in that took over functions already allocated to other browser plug-ins. Specialized plug-ins which only allow viewing of a specific file format may give way to more versatile plug-ins as users opt to get the most functionality out of just one download. But these “general purpose” plug-ins don’t allow a user to deactivate one type of file without giving up the use of others. However, as flexibility often gives way to convenience and marketing power, smaller companies who create plug-ins specifically for file formats such as MIDI will need to find more and more ways to compel web surfers to download.

Even if users choose Company A’s specialized plug-in, it would not matter because if users need to install Company B’s general purpose plug-in later to handle Company B’s proprietary file format, Company A’s plug-in by default no longer handles the file format it was included to handle. A large company could easily use a general purpose plug-in to obscure a small company’s file format.

The Force is with you.

Nevertheless, don’t let me dissuade you from using Apple’s QuickTime plug-in. I think the benefits of the QuickTime plug-in outweigh the potential industry ramifications. But let’s all make sure we find out what the next plug-in we download really does. Make sure you select About Plugins under your Netscape browser’s Help menu and find out what file formats your new plug-ins are handling. And if you don’t like the way a plug-in takes over the functions of other plug-ins, let the
developer know about it!

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