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Google Dropping Netscape Plugin API Support In Chrome/Blink

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the wither-portability dept.

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."

6 of 170 comments (clear)

  1. "standards-based web platform" by Daniel+Dvorkin · · Score: 5, Funny

    Standards are wonderful, and everyone should have their very own!

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    The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
    1. Re:"standards-based web platform" by XanC · · Score: 4, Insightful

      That may be, but why don't we "evolve" this other thing to cover all the existing use cases BEFORE disabling NPAPI?

  2. The new IE is here by Billly+Gates · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

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    http://saveie6.com/
  3. Re:If not NaCl or JS, then what? by RamiKro · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  4. Re:If not NaCl or JS, then what? by LordLimecat · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Nothing stops you from only writing a webpage thats HTML1 with no JS; just dont be surprised when noone wants to visit it.

  5. Torture.... by wbr1 · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

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    Silence is a state of mime.