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Google Dropping Netscape Plugin API Support In Chrome/Blink
An anonymous reader writes "Google today announced it is dropping Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface support in Chrome. The company will be phasing out support over the coming year, starting with blocking webpage-instantiated plugins in January 2014. Google has looked at anonymous Chrome usage data and estimates that just six NPAPI plug-ins were used by more than 5 percent of users in the last month. To 'avoid disruption' (read: attempt to minimize the confusion) for users, Google will temporarily whitelist the most popular NPAPI plugins: Silverlight, Unity, Google Earth, Google Talk, and Facebook Video."
Google offers NaCl as an alternative, and "Moving forward, our goal is to evolve the standards-based web platform to cover the use cases once served by NPAPI."
Standards are wonderful, and everyone should have their very own!
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I use the AmazonMP3Downloader plugin so when I purchase music from Amazon it gets added to my music library immediately.
AFAIK PPAPI (and NaCl) can't implement that because they need to save the music to places outside the sandbox.
Maybe Google can help define a "download to music library" HTML5 API?
NaCl is a good implementation of a terrible idea: i.e Running software in the browser is all kinds of wrong.
Mark my words: Chrome is going to end up being a second IE 6-like millstone around the IT industrys neck. We are already seeing web sites that only work in Chrome (and Safari, if you're lucky). Firefox, IE (!), and whichever intrepid fourth party browser engines still exist on the periphery, will be reduced to second-class citizens..
Yes. More work to do / less efficient task making = more manpower needed to get jobs done = more demand for software development labor = better job prospects for me. :)
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
More and more Chrome is reminding me of IE from the humble IE 4 which was the best browser to the jaguarnut of IE 6 which still has not completely died off yet in China and some corporate portals.
Chrome rushes to throw HTML 5 and CSS 3 features not standardized on W3C so they can pass HTML5test and calls them HTML 5 and CSS 3 but really are made just like box model and CSS were invented by IE. The W3C in the end decided to make it a little different which is why when Firefox went one way the corps hung onto IE 6 instead.
This NACL and plugins is all 21st activeX to me. If MS did this for IE 11 everyone would be screaming bloody murder.
http://saveie6.com/
Yes. I am against both. Cross platform programming as an Interpreter running in a sandbox (JavaScript) or a bytecode VM (Java, NaCl...) shouldn't be done through the browser.
The Internet should be slightly expanded HTML1 and CGI as far as I'm concerned. Maybe with an exception for audio\video if we can agree on a codec...
Keep application development and serving to the likes of Android's Play Store + Dalvik.
The Internet should be slightly expanded HTML1 and CGI as far as I'm concerned.
"No one will need more than 637 kB of memory for a personal computer..."
Apples and oranges. Having more RAM doesn't create a huge security risk like running code in a browser does.
Nothing stops you from only writing a webpage thats HTML1 with no JS; just dont be surprised when noone wants to visit it.
LOL... You were going along fine until you said "develop an app for GNU/Linux". Yeah, right - like any web developer is going to create an app specially for that 1.3% market...
Unlike the blockbuster that is Windows RT.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Even if the security issues could be put to rest, there's no justification for running applications in a document viewer.
If Google is so concerned with serving up cross platform applications, they can package a VM and an App Store along with their browser. They can even conceive of their own URI scheme that will pass requests to the App Store to download and initialize Apps on the VM.
Is it really too much to expect something better then serving GUIs the likes of Facebook and Gmail inside the browser?
The Internet should be slightly expanded HTML1 and CGI as far as I'm concerned.
Usability would be horrible. For example, web-based paint programs can currently use HTML5 Canvas, SWF, or Java. But without any sort of client-side scripting, they would have to use a server-side image map and make a round-trip for each click on the image. And imagine how much longer Slashdot comment pages would take to update if every time you expanded or collapsed a comment, the server had to resend the full text of all other comments.
Google once again shuts down a service/feature, but this time they have the audacity to rub NaCl in the wound. That burns, it really does.
Silence is a state of mime.
Exactly and for an example of what can happen look at the "Yahoo Porn Bug" in my journal, I had customers spamming the living hell out of everyone in their address books and all that took was a little code, a hidden iFrame, and a browser that runs the same permission level as the user, in that case Firefox.
Frankly the whole current system is just fucked up, you can have code from as many as a dozen different servers, splattered all over the planet, all just to load a single page. And as more and more websites go "Web 3.0 apps apps apps...did we mention we have apps?" the ability to block all that crap from God knows where diminishes. I think the problem is that JavaScript was just never built with security in mind, it was back in the day when organized cybercrime and the like was the realm of sci/fi and instead of starting over when the thing started getting unsafe we just put bandaids on the bullet wounds.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Actually, the fact that HTML1 doesn't exist stops you. HTML2 was an attempt to document what browsers of the time rendered (i.e. it was descriptive, as opposed to the prescriptive HTML3 and later), but there was no HTML1.
Why should I care about visits? I don't live off advertisements and page hits.
I'm interested in delivering information. A company's portfolio... A product's specifications... A personal contact page... A data sheet... Wikipedia with NoScript is done right as far as I'm concerned.
Presentation is highly important in this business. Like it or not, an attractive web site does wonders for the opinion of those who might stumble upon it. It does not have to be laden with graphics and other whiz-bang features that slow down the browser, but a boring page suggests a lack of bother and care by the company, which might translate into related opinions from those who browse the page.
Geeks continually misunderstand and downplay the significance of image. Humans are visual creatures - ignore this facet at your peril.
So you think the platform for useful apps should be owned by Google instead of being open to everyone?
there's no justification for running applications in a document viewer.
Except that most of the world finds it pretty convenient, and anything we've called a web browser in the last 15 years or so has been much more than a document viewer.
If Google is so concerned with serving up cross platform applications, they can package a VM and an App Store along with their browser.
They do. The V8 Javascript Engine is implemented as a VM. They include the Chrome Web Store in the desktop version of their browser as well. That doesn't mean that it's not beneficial to run apps delivered over the web in the browser, the way that every other vendor does.
Is it really too much to expect something better then serving GUIs the likes of Facebook and Gmail inside the browser?
And what's wrong with it? A sandboxed plugin API and Javascript VM makes more sense to me than downloading a native app to handle the same thing, and I down see a benefit to having a some kind of Net-VM app, separate from the browser, to run web apps in. Either way, you're still talking about running someone else's code. From that perspective, keeping the browser integrated with a sandboxed scripting and plugin environment makes more sense than any alternatives I've heard anyone propose.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
We should probably just go back to Gopher.
Deltron 3030 - Virus (music video)
Scanner support for is on my short list of things to implement in Firefox, along with webcrypto so that sites stop using Java for its crypto library. I'd love help with it for anyone who is interested.