did you know that you can simply open a single HTML file or web URL and instantly Play the full version of Minecraft Java Edition in your web browser yep you can but should you do this well my lawyer told me to say no and put this disclaimer on screen so take that as you will but regardless I'm going to tell you the story about how a very dedicated developer made Minecraft Java Edition run entirely within a web browser how became insanely popular and all the controversies that came with doing that especially when it came to Mojang's lawyers which is why I'm taking a huge risk when uploading this video but I'm doing it for you guys so let's get to it it all started with a player by the name of LAX one dude in 2020 he thought it would be really cool to somehow make Minecraft work in a web browser again because as of 2016 running regular Java Minecraft in a modern web browser is no longer supported so his idea was to get the entire game to run using JavaScript now the JavaScript programming language which is different from regular Java can in fact run in a web browser and is actually used in at least some form on 98% of websites on the internet even my own website uses JavaScript if he could somehow pull this off it would be an incred incredible feat of Minecraft engineering so LAX went to work to get Minecraft Java to run on JavaScript the entire game would have to be compiled with a tool called TVM which essentially makes regular Java applications work in JavaScript but it unfortunately wasn't that simple if you know anything about programming your program will usually require dependencies which are basically pieces of other code that your program depends on to be able to run it's kind of like ingredients when baking a cake you depend on eggs being in your recipe otherwise your cake won't set properly one of those ingredients or dependencies that Minecraft needs is something called lwjgl which is the primary backbone of the entire game without it Minecraft will not run at all you see the problem is that lwjgl cannot be compiled with TVM even worse Minecraft versions 1.6 and above required even more dependencies than just that so for his first version of the project he compromised with using Minecraft version 1.5 as his guinea pig which was originally released all the way back in 2013 now lax's solution with getting lwjgl to work was to spend an entire month manually rewriting the entire dependency from scratch to have compatibility with TVM therefore making it work in JavaScript but this was only one of the many issues he had to deal with other issues included having to get the graphics to work properly fix lag issues caused by JavaScript by rewriting multiple parts of the game and making servers function properly it took many months of programming and testing but near the end of 2020 the fully ported web version of Minecraft 1.5 which he called eagler craft was pretty much complete and and mostly stable a few years later in May of 2022 LAX decided to step up his game with eagler craft and update to Minecraft release 1.8 he chose this version to update to because it was his favorite and there was still wide support for it on many Minecraft servers including Hypixel but this of course required even more dependencies that he would have to modify to make work on JavaScript plus many other modifications where if I discussed all of them this video would be way too long so another developer by the name of aonami 2000 would also help out where LAX would otherwise get stuck also keep in mind that all of this work on making eagler craft 1.8 was done in secret as LAX didn't want to make false promises if they couldn't end up getting it to work but they eventually pulled it off and it took over 7 months to LAX called this version of eagler craft eagler craft X now of course I have to explain why this project was called eagler craft to begin with basically when LAX was in Middle School he thought it would be funny to develop a secret language one of the words in his language was eagler which means someone who eats eagle eggs and was meant to be used as an insult LAX knew that if eaglecraft got popular most of the player base would be middle schoolers so he named his browser Port of Minecraft after eagler from his middle school secret language in hopes that would enter the everyday language of other middle schoolers this dream would eventually become a reality as eagler craft became insanely popular with students in middle school and would typically refer to eagler craft as just eagler now there's many reasons why eagler ccraft became so popular the first thing is pretty obvious it's free and open source but of course the legality of that is quite questionable as we all know what happened to Minecraft forfree.com the only difference now is instead of Notch playing Quake over the whole ordeal Minecraft is owned by a multi-billion doll company with multi-billion dollar company lawyers to back them and we'll be talking a lot about that shortly the second reason why eagler craft is so popular is that it's extremely accessible searching Google for eagler craft will show you a plethora of websites that host the eagler craft client and because it's open source anyone can just copy the code to their website and now they're hosting an instance of eagler craft in fact lack's intentionally designed eagler craft to run locally from a single HTML file that's less than 15 megabytes in size for comparison just the assets of regular Minecraft 1.8 are over 100 megabytes the way this was done was by removing everything unnecessary in compressing what was for instance all of the music for the game was removed and the sounds and some of the textures had compression added to them now because eagler craft can be played locally from a file it also means that it can even be played without going to a website hosted on the internet this is why eagler craft is so popular with school students as the it departments usually block these kinds of websites on school Wi-Fi which triggered a few of them and a nightmare of it directors now aside from dodging school it admins eagler craft is also popular because it can play on almost any hardware including Chromebooks that a lot of schools now provide to students but other people got creative and I've also gotten the game to launch on appliances like a Samsung fridge and even a Tesla Model X only problem is you can't really connect a mouse and keyboard to a car so you couldn't actually move around in a world regardless I wonder what Hardware people will try to run eagler Craft on next or should they I guess that brings me to the legality part of this whole project obviously eagler craft distributed in its compiled form certainly breaks the Minecraft EA as it says in quote you must not distribute anything we've made but LAX thought of this for eagler craft X he had the idea to mimic projects like Minecraft mods by publishing his code in the form of patches that are applied to the games code instead of just illegally uploading a full copy of the decompiled Minecraft 1.8 source code to the internet but in practice this didn't really end up working because basically all the websites that hosted eagler craft distributed the whole compiled copy anyways and of course it wouldn't be long until Mojang had enough and would start cracking down on eagler craft in November of 2022 the first recorded MCA takedown request for anything eaglecraft related was sent to a Chinese eaglecraft server by an agency called app detex who have a contract with Mojang's parent company Microsoft that allows them to submit dmca takedown requests on their behalf now for those who don't know what a dmca takedown request is dmca stands for Digital Millennium Copyright Act which is a US law that protects copyright owners from illegal copying of their software and the dmca takedown requests are formal notices sent to potential offenders requesting to remove the content they claim is being used illegally usually if you don't comply with the request the owners of the copyrighted software could take legal action against you anyways this dmca takedown of that Chinese server took LAX by surprise and he didn't want to take any chances so he decided to delete his GitHub repository for eagler craft but of course he let people know beforehand thus giving the chance for over 2,000 people to Fork the projects which ended up making it pretty annoying for Mojang to dmca every single one shortly after LAX deleted the entire project from his GitHub account successfully putting it out of Mojang's reach or so he thought just a few days later LAX found himself inundated with dmca takedown requests this time coming directly from Mojang's headquarters first on his GitHub account for a copy of a Minecraft Beta 1.3 version of eagler craft that he forgot to delete then on some of his websites that hosted eagler craft and on some Google Drive links he shared LAX also found out that two dmca were even sent to his ISP due to him hosting eagler Craft on it and on top of all of this Mojang allegedly contacted Discord and had his server deleted and his account terminated in response LAX decided to permanently remove all of the eagle aircraft content from those sources as you don't want to mess with dmca requests now after all of this LAX would abandon eagler craft after all what he was doing was breaking copyright law and moing was firing back hard it was time to give up retire quit yeah no despite multiple takedown requests LAX got right back to work on eaglecraft continuing to edit on a GitHub alternative called gitlab and improving it even more until mojen contacted gitlab and demanded that all of his repositories and account should be deleted so pretty much from here the cycle of dmca takedowns and re-uploading of eagler craft to other platforms continued over and over again which included lax's own postings as well as multiple eagler craft servers and forks of the project at this point Mojang was sending out so many dmca takedown requests that their legal team even created a template for dmca takedown requests to send to suspected offenders in total LAX received eight dmca takedown requests and possibly hundreds more were handed out to others hosting eagler craft in any way shape or form even countless YouTube videos talking about eagler craft were DMC a so by me uploading this video I'm taking a massive risk myself at this point it was very obvious that Mojang wanted eagler crafts to be gone so as one final attempt to appease Mojang LAX created a repository on his GitHub account with a message to mojing offering them the source code to eagler craft for official use on minecraft.net with the reason being that eagler craft runs so well on low-end Hardware like Chromebooks which could be useful for use in the official game but unfortunately Mojang didn't respond to this probably because they just weren't interested now at this point you may be wondering if anything actually came out of all of these dmca takedown requests Well turns out not as Mojang hasn't actually sued anyone over eagler craft yet I'm not a lawyer so I can only speculate as to why this is the case it could be the fact that LAX refuses to accept any money whatsoever for his project after all LAX told me that the only reason he's still working on the eaglecraft project is because he just likes the challenge of making Minecraft run in a web browser that's it so if there's no financial gain behind it Mojang may see that as a lesser threat to their bottom line although other websites hosting eagler craft making money off ads may be a different story so that's the story of eagler craft for now who knows what will happen to it next maybe eaglecraft will update to an even later version of Minecraft unless Mojang shuts it down before then so I guess I'll just have to be keeping my eagle eyes on this project [Music]