Chrome Story

Chrome NPAPI Support Going Away in 2015

Moving away from the original plan of dropping support for NPAPI plugins in 2014, Google is giving one more year before they stop supporting them completely.

In April 2015 NPAPI support will be disabled by default in Chrome and we will unpublish extensions requiring NPAPI plugins from the Chrome Web Store. Although plugin vendors are working hard to move to alternate technologies, a small number of users still rely on plugins that haven’t completed the transition yet. We will provide an override for advanced users (via chrome://flags/#enable-npapi) and enterprises (via Enterprise Policy) to temporarily re-enable NPAPI while they wait for mission-critical plugins to make the transition.

So, in 2015:

  • Google will remove the whitelist that they currently use to allow NPAPI plugins
  • April 2015 NPAPI support will be disabled by default in Chrome
  • Extensions requiring NPAPI plugins  will be unpublished from the Chrome Web Store.
  • Remove the flag chrome://flags/#enable-npapi and also the enterprise policy that allows NPAPI

If you are a user, do not worry much, most of the things will be transitioned by this time. If you are a developer, more details here.

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2 responses to “Chrome NPAPI Support Going Away in 2015”

  1. mzzt
    The MAZZTer

    Looked into this. Flash is, of course, not affected as you can use the PPAPI version which is more secure than the NPAPI one. One exception is that Flash will be unable to utilize the Flash “Trusted Location Settings” in PPAPI because of the sandbox, so if you use advanced JS/Flash apps from file:// which need the NPAPI Flash you’re gonna have a bad time.

    Unity is working on a pure JS WebGL port so the deprecation of their plugin will not be an issue.

    Netflix is apparently working in HTML5 now. Netflix was the major usage of Silverlight.

    Dunno what Java is doing.

    Reply
    1. Dinsan – Bangalore, India – Digital Minimalist & Content Developer. Drinks Tea and writes Stuff (mostly about Chromebooks). My views are mostly copied from others.
      Dinsan Francis

      How long do you think we will need before flash is completely off the shelves?

      Reply

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