Thanks for the info, I wasn't aware of their recent development.

Yep, this is intended behavior. The guys are going to release a new Blender version which may or may not break compatibility. We are going to support this new version if they release it during this week, otherwise we'll support it by the next month.

Yep, this can be a problem. For now we have the "autorotate" option which we hope helps a bit - the user sees a dynamic picture (like in the sunglasses example). We'll definitely think about what can be done here, thanks for suggestion!

Correct!

This idea is currently being discussed. There is also an initiative called Theory Send to provide a free Blend4Web hosting.

The ability to have a smaller file size would be more if a client wanted a simple 3D logo to be integrated within a webpage or something similar.

If the 3D scene content itself was say about 100k, there seems to still be about one and a half megabytes of JS code ( which of course includes base-64 encoded images etc ).

Agreed!

> the code is cleaned of all unused features.

Maybe as an internal test, could you export a simple 3D cube, and see how small a .html file you can get?

Well, to be more precise, the code is cleaned of all API which are not imported by the application. This is performed during app compilation. Doing optimizations on per-feature basis at the moment of export would increase export time significantly, up to several seconds for a simple cube and much more for complicated scenes. Also, 1.6 Mb is not a big deal nowadays, so as far as the code base is small, we are not very concerned with implementing such optimizations.

Nonetheless, Blend4Web is open source software (there's also a commercial license which welcomes modifications) so if you are interested you could give your idea a try.

You can use JSON format instead of HTML. This way all scene data will be conveniently exposed to JavaScript. Please see these tuts:
Creating an Interactive Web Application
Webmasters! 3 Ways to 3D Web

When will the beta version be available for download?

A developer preview can be released during next week.

Hi,

The .html file includes all of the features of Blend4Web, including physics etc.

For the record, Blend4Web currently has no physics support for exported self-contained HTML files, physics is available only if you load JSON files (with the web player, for example)

It would be interesting to see what the smallest file size you can get with Blend4Web, to get just a rotatable box ( no physics, no animation support, no sounds support, no advanced shader code etc ).

Removing parts of unused JS code is a good idea, especially with bloated code bases. It is actually already in place: upon
building applications (including the webplayer itself), the code is cleaned of all unused features.

I would also recommend to use a combination of JSON (+ binary) files and external textures/sounds which is much more efficient option than single base64-encoded HTMLs.

Very good, as always! We'll share it across our social media accounts.